Here’s hoping your holiday dinner is eclipsed by the people eating it, Merry Christmas!
(PS. we’re having steaks, a great gift from some friends. What are you cooking?)
Monthly Archive for December, 2008
This is clearly a food based blog. We typically write about things you can eat. Technically, you could eat this week’s topic, but you’ll probably get a tummy ache.
Our friend (and first-commenter) Karin gave us the idea when she gave us a present of fresh all natural boiling potpourri. Potpourri, as a rule, smells like an old ladies bathroom, but when your potpourri is a bag with an orange, lemon, cranberries and cinnamon sticks, it’s pretty cool. Just slice up the citrus and boil everything in a big pot of water. It smells great, and adds skin-soothing moisture to the ridiculous dry winter air.
Orange, Lemon & 1/4 c Cranberries
1 whole nutmeg
1 teaspoon each whole cloves, whole all spice & juniper berries
Three each bay leaves and cinnamon sticks
Karin’s gift segued nicely into a problem we were having, how to decorate our Christmas tree in the post-Wilbur-is-walking world. Little-man loves to grab things and throw them over his shoulder. Glass ornaments would be terrible. So we went looking for alternatives, and found an easy recipe for baking your own ornaments.
Baked Ornaments: 2 cups flour 2 cups salt 2 cups water - stir, knead into a ball. roll to 1/4 ” thick. cut shapes with cookie cutters, poke holes in the top with a pencil (to hang them from). bake on greased cookie sheet at 350 for 20 minutes or until hard. let cool, add a string, and hang from your tree.
We had some friends over (hi Zoe and Moon!) and whipped up a batch of ornaments. We also did some fancy string tying with cinnamon sticks and pie tin cutting for fancy tree topping stars. We now have a safe Wilbur-proof tree. Occasionally he plays the game, undecorate-the-tree-and-leave-the-ornaments-in-the-middle-of-the-floor, but it’s safe.
Chances are, when you think of oatmeal, you think of instant oatmeal. Tear open a packet, add hot water, and you’re set. It’s not bad, it’s easy, and relatively good for you. However, there’s a few options popping up at most grocery stores that let you play around with oatmeal a bit more than just straight instant oatmeal.
Steel Cut Oats
On the spectrum of oatmeal choices, steel cut oats are on the far left of the unprocessed scale, whereas instant oatmeal is as far as you can process the oats without making them a powder. Because they’re not squished down, they have a lot of flavor, but require a lot of cooking.
We like them a whole bunch, but the 15-20 minutes of cooking time make them a hard choice during the week. You can put them in the slow cooker overnight, but we don’t typically plan that far in advance. In our book, steel cut is a weekend treat.
Scottish / Irish Oatmeal
Easy to make, lots of flavor.
Scottish / Irish oats (really, no difference that we can see, clearly the whole Irish / Scottish thing is a marketing gimmick) are slightly more processed than steel cut but significantly less processed than instant. They take about three minutes to make, and have lots of flavor. The formula is straightforward, use one part oats to three parts water, microwave for three minutes. The multiple threes make it easy to make them on auto pilot at 5:45 in the morning when Wilbur wakes up.
Great, I have a bowl of plain oats, now what?
One thing instant oats have going for them is lots of crazy flavors. You don’t have to think much about adding stuff, because they’re already pretty sugared and mapled. With the less processed varieties, the flavor is your burden (and joy) to bear. Here’s a few options we’ve tried that work out great:
- dried fruit
- chopped apples
- sliced bananas
- milk and honey
- brown sugar
- nuts
- any combination of the above
- and, the most controversial, (our favorite): peanut butter
“Peanut butter? In oatmeal? Are you crazy?” Yep. It’s awesome. Our friend Erica Burns’ grandfather clued us in by way of Erica, and we never looked back. It’s our favorite oatmeal additive. If we owned Quaker, we’d release it as a flavor and clean house. The world is ready for peanut butter flavored oatmeal, get on board while it’s still hip and underground.
PB Oatmeal, not much to look at, but it's delicious.
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