Tag Archive for 'breakfast'

Playing with Oatmeal

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chrisandcamri
on December 7, 2008
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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.

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.

PB Oatmeal, not much to look at, but it's delicious.

Marmalade Shortcut

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chrisandcamri
on April 30, 2007
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A few pints of finished Marmalade.

A few pints of finished Marmalade.

A few weeks ago we lamented how difficult it was to make your own marmalade. It turns out, pleasant little English women agree. The little English women didn’t give up though, they persevered, and preserved. With a little bit of innovation, they decided to can up pre-chopped seville oranges, with a marmalade recipe on the back.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why the sun never set on the British Empire. Innovation! Determination! 8 pounds of sugar! Yes, the recipe on a can of “Ma-made Canned Seville Oranges” calls for four pounds of sugar per batch of marmalade, since we decided to do two batches at once, that meant a whopping 8 pounds of pure sugar.

We started early Sunday morning. Our friend Tish came over. This is an honest to goodness pleasant woman of British descent. We thought her presence would not only be pleasant, but also give the whole proceeding an air of Miss Marple like sophistication. I ran to Jewel and picked up the sugar, stopped at the Ace hardware on Lincoln to buy 12 pint jars, and then we got started.

We ordered the Ma-made canned oranges two weeks ago from shopenglandonline.com. We thought for sure we’d have to seek out a recipe to go along with the cans, but we didn’t…Ma-made printed it right on the side of the can. I guess there isn’t much call for a giant can of sliced seville oranges without a marmalade recipe printed on the side.

The recipe is pretty straight forward. The whole process took us about an hour or so. The kitchen smelled great the whole time. It got a teeny bit tricky towards the end, we weren’t sure how to tell if the marmalade had “set” enough to put in the jars. The can suggested a “wrinkle test,” where you put a small amount of it on a plate to cool, then run your finger across it. If it wrinkles, it’s ready. We weren’t sure the degree to which wrinkles were necessary, so we sort of winged it. It turned out we took it off the heat at just the right time.

Ladling the scalding hot jelly into jars was as painful as it sounds. All of us came away with at least one small jelly burn. One of the great things about spooning the jelly in hot is that it sterilizes the jars for you. As long as you heat the jars up a bit with hot tap water, they won’t break when you pour the hot marmalade in them. Put a lid on, and wait a few minutes. As the jar cools, the little bit of air in it compresses, which eventually pulls the pop top of the lid down. You have an officially sealed jar. Tish gave a jar of it to her Mom, an actual British subject. The review was good, “It remind me of marmalade in England.” Huzzah!

We made 11 pints of marmalade that day, at a cost of around $60, so around $5 per pint. We didn’t really save any money, but we certainly didn’t lose any either, plus it was super fun. Any amount of money is worth the thrill of a jelly burn and answering the typical “happy-monday-what’d-you-do-this-weekend” question with “not much, just made 11 pints of marmalade.”

For more pictures of the process, check out our flickr set.

Breakfast Cereal Roundup

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chrisandcamri
on March 29, 2007
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Tulip gets close to the cereal.

Tulip gets close to the cereal.

We’re fans of breakfast. As much as we’d like to have eggs and pancakes every morning, we don’t have time, and we don’t want to weigh 500 pounds. So, for practical reasons, we mostly stick to toast, or oatmeal, or yogurt and muesli. About half the time, we eat cold cereal and milk. Which isn’t as unhip as it used to be, given that we recently paid $5 for a bowl of cereal at a cereal-boutique in Evanston. What follows is a run down of our favorite breakfast cereals. Most fall into the super-crunchy-healthy category, but there’s also some sugary good stuff in there as well.

Milk

A quick word about milk, a year or so ago we switched to organic milk, and we’ve never looked back. It’s richer, more milky flavored, and better for you. We encourage you to try out whatever brand of organic milk you can try. We like it. As a double-aside, Camri barely puts any milk on her cereal, I drown mine. I like having a glass of milk in the bowl when I’m done. Then the kittens get to lick the milk residue off the side of the bowl. When I have cereal, everyone gets a little treat. Now, on to the cereals.

Organic Optimum Power Breakfast with Flax Soy and Blueberry

That’s some title, eh? If you’re thinking, “this stuff probably looks like twigs,” you’re right. It totally looks like twigs. To an extent, it also tastes like twigs, except with berries. It’s good. It gets a ten on the crunchy fiber scale. Be forewarned, if you’re not big into fiber, and you have a big bowl of this stuff, you might…uh…not want to make any plans. It’s going to clean you out. Optimum. Power.

Quaker Essentials Oatmeal Squares

This is Camri’s favorite. The Quaker Oats man decided to make little cinnamon squares. He’s good at it. They taste great, have a nice crunch, and don’t get soggy in milk. However, they’re sort of deceptive, they’re not really as good for you as you’d think. If you stacked them up against a sugar cereal, like…say…fruity pebbles, you might be surprised that they’re not that far apart in terms of fiber, calories and fat. Which leads us to…

Fruity Pebbles

Early in our relationship, we had the inevitable, “what was your favorite breakfast cereal when you were a kid” discussion. It’s a tense time in any relationship. What if she liked something dumb like Lucky Charms? What if he was only allowed to have Grape Nuts? It turns out, we both picked Fruity Pebbles as our number one kids cereal. It’s crazy good. Lots of color, absurdly sweet, makes your milk turn funny colors. Shockingly, it’s really not that bad for you. It has a good amount of fiber, is pretty low cal, and has a teeny bit of fat. Plus, it has wacky games on the box. Fruity Pebbles doesn’t stop at keeping your body fit; Fruity Pebbles exercises your mind. Plus, as far as we know, Fruity Pebbles is the first breakfast cereal to feature a rap as a jingle, “I’m the master rapper and I’m hear to say, I love Fruity Pebbles in a major way.”

Total Raisin Bran

It’s Raisin Bran, under the Total umbrella. You know what’s in raisin bran…raisins…bran. It’s good, it’s classic, why mess with it? I can’t tell the difference between it and every other raisin bran on the market, but Camri insists that Total is the best. It’s like the Mercedes of Raisin Bran. More sugar per raisin, more bran per flake. Give yourself a treat, make your raisin bran Total.

Frosted Mini Wheats, Big Bites

For whatever reason, we rarely hear about people eating the big bites. Everyone wants their mini wheats to be mini. Why? Live a little folks, get the big bites. They totally break the typical breakfast cereal mold. They’re huge, they’re covered in sugar, yet still manage to be pretty good for you. They’re my favorite 9pm cereal as well. Something about the big biscuits in milk, half coated in sugar, makes me think I’m eating dessert. Don’t get those strawberry mini wheats though, they’re terrible.

Dundee Marmalade

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chrisandcamri
on March 2, 2007
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I was in sunny Dallas this past week at a geek conference. When I got home, Camri presented me with a jar of Dundee style marmalade. Although it’s really not wildly different than other marmalade’s I’ve tried, it’s distinct. The rind pieces are much larger, and more plentiful, which gives the marmalade a more bitter bite. It’s really pretty good, but I wouldn’t recommend it for someone new to orange marmalade. If marmalade is an aquired taste, this is the straight whiskey of the marmalade world. Recommended, but use with caution.

Although it’s uncited, the wikipedia offers this explanation of Dundee marmalade:

The Scottish city of Dundee has a long association with marmalade. The oft-related story of how this came about begins sometime in the 1700s when a Spanish ship with a cargo of Seville oranges docked in Dundee harbour to shelter from storms. A grocer by the name of James Keiller bought a vast amount of the cargo at a knockdown price, but found it impossible to sell the bitter oranges to his customers. He passed the oranges on to his wife Janet who used them instead of the normal quinces to make a fruit preserve. The marmalade proved extremely popular and the Keiller family went in to business producing marmalade. However this is almost complete fiction. The truth is that in 1797, James Keiller, who was unmarried at the time, and his mother Janet opened a factory to produce “Dundee Marmalade”, that is marmalade containing thick chunks of orange rind, this recipe (probably invented by his mother) being a new twist on the already well-known fruit preserve of orange marmalade.

Malted Pancakes

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chrisandcamri
on February 22, 2007
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For a long time, Clarks on Belmont was our favorite place to get breakfast. When we moved to Lincoln Square, it just wasn’t as convenient, so our visits dropped off. Our favorite thing to get there were the pancakes. It took us a while to figure out why they tasted so much better than other places. After some subtle investigation (we asked the waitress) we found out they used malt in their batter.

For years, we occasionally tried to recreate the Clarks pancakes. We added malted milk, malt syrup, malt extract, anything that had the word “malt” in it. Malt is a tricky devil. The wikipedia article on malt explains, “Malting is a process applied to cereal grains, in which the grains are made to germinate and then are quickly dried before the plant develops.” Malt is used in lots of things: beer, whiskey, movie theater candy, and pancakes.

After countless experiments, we pretty much gave up. Then, out of the blue, we ran across Carbon’s Golden Malted Pancake Flour in the speciality food section of the Costplus World Market in Evanston. Giddy, we whipped up a few batches. All of them turned out great.

Mystery solved. If you want malted pancakes, try out the flour that specifically says “malted pancake flour.” Duh. We’re still going to try and make the flour for ourselves, as we’re ornery like that, but for now, we have a good go-to for pancake-Saturdays.

Miss Marmalade

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chrisandcamri
on February 1, 2007
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It’s winter at your English country estate. A fussy old lady is solving the murder of your wealthy father. You’re checking your stocks in the Times, while you munch on a piece of toast. Quick! What’s on your toast?

Butter?

Sure.

Marmalade?

You bet.

You are Master and Commander of Her Majesty’s Ship “Indefatigable”. The wind roars outside your cabin windows. You flick a weevil off a ship’s biscuit, and spread what across its dry surface? Marmalade? Ahoy!

The point is, if you’re English, marmalade seems to be a part of your story, if not…it’s just sort of a quirky jelly that most people don’t like. Why? We don’t know. Camri doesn’t like it, she says it tastes like children’s Tylenol, I love it, in the winter time it tastes like yummy sunshine. I decided I wanted to make my own. I checked into the history of the stuff on Wikipedia, then I found a couple of recipes online. All of them used seville oranges, which are hard to get in the US. You can order big cans of them, which would yield several pounds of marmalade. I don’t need several pounds.

I considered making a bunch and giving away jars, but it turns out, I don’t really know anyone that likes marmalade. Then I thought, “hey, maybe I should make it with regular oranges!” It turns out, seville oranges have more pectin in them, meaning that I’d have to add pectin to a regular orange marmalade, and get into funky canning. Plus, if there’s any chance that the oranges you use were treated with pesticides, you’ll end up having really yucky jam. You need to find organic oranges.

What is this all building up to? I totally failed. I didn’t make my own marmalade. This is a story about giving up. Sorry folks. I stone cold gave up. I bought a jar of marmalade at the grocery store and called it a day.

Despite my failure, I can still live out my marmalade fantasies at breakfast. If you haven’t tried it, I suggest you do. If I can get a couple more people into orange-y jelly, I can justify ordering a big can of seville oranges and make a few pounds of marmalade.

Kiss My Grits

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chrisandcamri
on November 2, 2006
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Bob's Red Mill Corn Grits, our favorite kind

Bob's Red Mill Corn Grits, our favorite kind

Corn used to be dried for storage. Dry corn lasts a lot longer than watery fresh corn. When you were ready to eat your dried corn, you could take it to the local grist mill and have it ground into corn meal suitable for corn bread, corn mush, stuff like that. As the stone wheel ground the dried corn into meal, heavier pieces would resist the stone. These are “grits.” Keep in mind, when you’re eating grits, you’re eating the really strong part of corn. Awesome.

Grits are making a comeback, I’ve seen articles about them in the New York Times food section, I’ve heard of (but never found) fancy heirloom grits grown from 19th century kernels of corn, I’ve even heard you can get grits at Charlie Trotters, though I can’t afford to find out for myself.

Grits, Hominy, and Polenta

Hominy is corn, corn that’s been “nixtamalized” which means, “soaking in an alkaline solution.” The corn kernels swell up to almost three times their size. Whenever we go to Florida to visit Camri’s Dad we almost always have fried hominy for breakfast. It’s really good. It also can be ground up to make “hominy” grits.

Polenta is really just Italian for grits. They’re exactly the same, just slightly different preparations. The raw material is just chunks of stone ground corn. No real difference. Marketers disagree, but they’re wrong. Polenta == Grits.

Preparing

Grits are simple to prepare, and leave lots of room for interpretation. The basic formula is “one cup of grits to two cups of water, plus salt”. Boil the water, add the grits, turn down to simmer, cover, and wait about ten minutes. Fluff and serve. Polenta, on the other hand, is typically three waters to one grits, with cheese and milk added in the middle, and a lot of stirring. It comes out much creamier, but takes a lot longer to prepare.

Variations

Back to traditional grits, once you get the basic two to one formula down, there’s lots of room for variations. Try adding a bunch of shredded cheese and some milk towards the end, you get cheese grits. Add a bunch of butter and more salt at the end, butter grits. Top either with a few fried eggs (ideally from your well seasoned cast iron skillet.) and you can officially say you’re having a southern breakfast. You can also sweeten the grits with milk and honey for a different style of breakfast, or add chunks of bacon for a good salty breakfast. Grits are a blank canvas folks, if you can dream it, you can do it. Grits are forgiving.

MMM…Muesli

Published
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chrisandcamri
on October 26, 2006
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The bulk food department at Whole Foods

The bulk food department at Whole Foods

We’d seen “Mueslix” before, but never tried “Muesli” until we went to Ireland for a friend’s wedding. Muesli is German for “dry rolled oats, nuts, and berries.” Actually, to be fair, while Camri was discovering Muesli, I was discovering eggs, thick bacon, and black pudding. While I was purposely not asking what the difference between white and black pudding was, Camri was mixing Muesli with yogurt and enjoying every bite.

When we got back home, we found authentic European style Muesli, but were always a little dismayed at the price. “dry rolled oats, nuts and berries” are subject to some sort of obscure import tax. A few months go by, and we’re in Mexico. Again, Muesli and yogurt are Camri’s breakfast of choice, while I have Machaca and Huevos Rancheros. Just like the Ireland trip, we came back home to re-discover that Muesli is pretty expensive here.

Then it dawns on us, “this is really just rolled oats, nuts and berries, we can make this for cheap.” So we did. We went to the Whole Foods bulk food department, picked out a bunch of oats, nuts, and berries, and mixed it together. We ended up with this recipe. Enjoy.

Camri’s Muesli
The proportions are really to taste, we tried to measure them officially, but decided it was better to make the recipe as a guide. The best part of buying from the bulk food department is you don’t have to buy anything you don’t want. If you don’t like flax seed, don’t put it in there. If you do like flax seed, put a bunch in there. It will always be Muesli as long as you call it that. Again, Muesli is German for “oats and stuff.”

Mix this up in a big Ziploc bag
Rolled Oats
Quick Oats
Raisins
Hazel Nuts
Almonds
Flax Seed

Add some vanilla yogurt right before you eat it, and enjoy. For a kind of weird change up, mix the yogurt and Muesli together the night before. The oats suck a lot of the moisture out of the yogurt, giving you a Greek style yogurt. It’s really good. If you want to make it more “dessert” like, add some honey.

The Whole Foods bulk food section really scared us for a while. It seemed hard to navigate, like we’d buy something that didn’t taste good, or we wouldn’t want. We were also sort of unsure whether or not it was actually worth buying rice in bulk, are you really saving money? We did a really brief price comparison, and it turns out you save about 10% buying bulk. “Bulk” is sort of the wrong way to think of it. The best part about buying bulk is you don’t have to buy in a specific size. If you’re making pesto sauce, why buy a full bag of pine nuts? Just buy what you need from the bulk aisle. Whole Foods also has a free booklet describing all their bulk items and how to cook them. It’s a nice guide. One more note, Whole Foods actually has Muesli in their bulk department. If you want to cheat, go ahead and buy it.

For more background on the origin of Muesli, check out the Wikipedia Article.