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.

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