Category: Food & Wine

Thermos Oatmeal

Photo courtesy of kellogg

When Nick and I were in Winthrop between Christmas & New Year’s we ate steel cut oatmeal every morning, courtesy of Eileen’s amazing crockpot / rice cooker. I’ve been wanting to try this at home but have hesitated so far because it seems impractical to haul out the 4-quart crockpot for a single, measly serving of oatmeal. (We don’t have a microwave, so cooking a larger quantity and reheating it isn’t all that practical.)

Enter the thermos! I read about cooking oatmeal overnight in a thermos two years ago on Kent’s Bike Blog. I never got around to it trying it then, because our wide mouth thermos sucked. It was old and never kept anything hot for more than 30 minutes. I got a new, 16-ounce one recently, though, so with Eileen’s oatmeal fresh in my mind, I decided it was time to give it a try.

The basic recipe is 1 part oats to 4 parts liquid. The type of liquid varies depending on which recipe you look at. Most use water; some use milk or other non-dairy substitute. Tomorrow is a big day - full of mountain biking and mud - so I decided to pump up my first batch with some extra goodies. (Hmmm...Now that I think about it, I may have made a fatal mistake in my technique. More on that in a minute!)

First, here’s what I did:

* 1/2 cup frozen blueberries
* 1 cup apple juice
* 1/4 cup steel-cut oatmeal
* 1 tablespoon ground flaxseed
* 3 small dates, chopped (aka “date crumlets")
* 2 tablespoons sunflower seeds

Before going to bed:

1. Boil water and put it in a wide-mouth thermos.
2. Put fruit and juice in a saucepan and bring to a boil.
2. Dump the water and put the oatmeal, dates and flax seed in the thermos.
3. Add the boiling juice & fruit, swish to mix, then cap the thermos.

If all goes well, the oatmeal will be ready when I wake up! I’ll add the sunflower seeds, give it a stir, and eat!

(This is a nutrition powerhouse BTW: 614 cal; 104g carbohydrates; 16g protein; 17g fat (only 24% of the calories); 21g fiber. I get three fruit servings, too!)

Okay, now for what I think I may have done wrong. Have you ever used ground flax seed and water as an egg substitute? It works marvelously in many recipes, but leave the water and flax to sit for too long and you get a really thick gelatinous goo. Put it in something, like say pancake batter, and the batter will get nice and thick after 15 minutes or so. Since I added the flax seed to the hot juice and oats tonight, I’m wondering whether my oatmeal will be super ultra thick and gooey tomorrow morning. I also worry that if the juice thickens up because of the flax seed that maybe the oats won’t absorb it properly and I’ll be left with flax jelly and hard little oat nibs.

Only time will tell! I should probably plan on getting up in time to make an alternate breakkie if this is a total failure, though.

Update: The oatmeal was awesome! The blueberries added an electric purple hue and the apple juice made it nice and sweet. There were fortunately no adverse effects from the flax seeds, at all. I had hoped it would be a bit warmer, but you can’t have everything! Next time I’ll pre-chop the dates and leave them out with the sunflower seeds to add to the oatmeal in the morning.

Vegan, sugar-free hot cocoa

I had a hankering for hot chocolate today after raking leaves in the back yard. I’m still keeping my dairy and sugar to a minimum, though, so I have lots of energy to study. This is the super tasty concoction I came up with. It’s thick and creamy like a European-style hot chocolate. I don’t like my cocoas super chocolatey; consider increasing the amount of cocoa to two tablespoons if you do.

Vegan Hot Cocoa
Serves 1

1 1/4 cups unsweetened soy milk or other dairy substitute
1 tbsp unsweetened cocoa
2 tbsp date sugar (a couple dates would be a good substitute if you don’t have date sugar)
2 tbsp walnuts
couple drops of vanilla extract

Combine all the ingredients in a high-power blender and blend until smooth. Heat gently on the stove and serve.

Is it hard to be vegan?

While we haven’t made any big announcements, people are starting to catch on that Nick and I eat a nearly vegan diet. When I explain what we eat (nutrient-dense foods such as fruits, vegetables, beans, whole grains, and nuts/seeds) we’re often confronted with the same question: “Is it hard?” We also hear that people admire how we eat, but don’t think they could ever do it themselves.

The answer to the first question is complicated. Eating a nutritarian diet at home is relatively straight-forward because you control what you cook. There are so many wonderful fruits and vegetables, that after nine months of eating this way we’ve yet to become bored with our choices.

My biggest challenge has been overcoming addictions to one or two foods that I don’t want to eat. Cheese tastes so darn good! But it is one of the worst substances (I’m not going to call it food) you could choose to eat, because it is made almost entirely of saturated fat (linked to heart disease) and animal protein (linked to cancer and osteoporosis, among other things). Instead of beating myself up about wanting to eat it, though, I limit my consumption to once a week, and then only a tiny amount as a garnish. Maybe someday it will simply become unappealing.

Eating a nutritarian diet away from home is more complicated. If I’m eating at a friend or relative’s house, I don’t feel it is polite to turn down food that someone has worked hard to prepare. I always volunteer to bring vegetable dishes and have found that many people almost always appreciate this. Often people really like to eat vegetables, but don’t like preparing them. I sample small portions of the foods that are not vegan, and try to focus what I eat on things that are compatible with my way of eating.

Eating at restaurants can be more difficult. I’m headed to Le Pichet tonight for dinner, for example. A quick look at their menu and you’ll see there isn’t one vegetarian entree, let alone a vegan one. Restaurants are getting better with their salads, though, and there is usually one awesome looking one that the chef can make into an entree-sized meal. Tonight I’ll probably ask the server if I can get a super-sized version of their salad with white runner beans, apples, dandelion greens and a cider-chestnut vinaigrette (on the side). I could choose to let my diet choices go for the night. I’ve tried this approach in the past and found it doesn’t serve me very well. The meal admittedly tastes wonderful, but I feel just horrible about a half-hour afterward. I wake up in a fog the next day and can’t seem to find any physical or mental energy without resorting to caffeine.

For those that don’t think they could ever do it, I’d like to offer you a five-day menu to try it out. You can do anything for five days, right? If you try this menu, let me know how it goes. Did you like the food? How did your body feel as you detoxed? What was challenging? What came easily?

Monday
Breakfast: Pumpkin-Spice Oatmeal and orange juice
Lunch: Apple Edamame Salad, bowl of tomato soup, and a roll
Snack: piece of fruit and a handful of raw nuts
Dinner: Pepita pasta with spinach and dried cranberries

Tuesday
Breakfast: Green smoothie (Combine 3/4 cup of juice and two big handfuls of spinach in a blender and blend until well combined. Add 1 banana, 1 pear, a handful of frozen berries, and 1 tbsp of ground flaxseed. Blend and serve.)
Lunch: Quinoa Pilaf Salad and a piece of fruit
Snack: veggies and hummus
Dinner: Clouds in the Sunset (aka Roasted Butternut and Cauliflower Soup), roll, roasted green beans

Wednesday
Breakfast: Quick Banana Breakfast to Go (one banana, chopped + 1 cup blueberries + 2 tablespoons walnuts chopped + 1/4 cup rolled oats + 1/3 cup cranberry or pomegranate juice)
Lunch: leftover soup from yesterday + green salad (lettuce with leftover green beans, chopped almonds, white beans, and cherry tomatoes topped with balsamic vinegar and a dash of olive oil) + a piece of fruit
Snack: Fruit & raw nuts
Dinner: Creamy red pepper polenta with roasted mushrooms

Thursday
Breakfast: leftover pumpkin oatmeal
Lunch: Mixed green salad (something light to tide you over until Thanksgiving dinner)
Dinner: Is it possible to enjoy a vegan Thanksgiving? Here are three menu suggestions:
Recipe Collection 1
Recipe Collection 2
Recipe Collection 3

Friday
Breakfast: Golden Spice Pancakes with maple syrup
Lunch: Leftovers from Thanksgiving dinner (yay!)
Snack: Veggie sticks and hummus
Dinner: Celery Root Soup with Granny Smith Apples

Bon apetit!

All gone!

I wanted to give a big THANK YOU! to everyone who helped with Plum Harvest ‘09. We picked more than 70 pounds again, which is quite a bit of fruit!

So...thank you Anne and Ronan (pictured) for being the first to help pick and eat. Thank you Kieth and Cathy for loaning us your ladder again. Thank you mom, Brian, and dad, for helping us with the lion’s share of the harvesting. Thank you mom for loaning me your canning equipment. Thank you Cathy for the dehydrator, which faithfully continues to dry the plums and plum leather. Thank you to all of my friends who graciously agreed to eat a bag of plums. And last, but not least, thank you Nick for being such an awesome spouse and taking up the slack around the house while I devoted days to canning and preserving.

Dos Modelo Corona

Happy Mexican Monday!