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asalexander, flickr
Confession: I could eat oatmeal daily and never tire of it. Does that sound weird to you? Then maybe you're remembering oatmeal as that unpleasant gloppy stuff—a double for wallpaper paste and just as tasty—that was served up to you as a kid. Me, I had my own painful childhood oatmeal memories to work through, but once I did I was hooked. And maybe you'll be, too.
1. Health benefits. How do you feel about lower cholesterol, reduced chance of heart attack, and reduced risk of acquiring Type 2 diabetes? And what about fiber (oatmeal has loads)? Increased fiber not only helps you feel more satisfied, it's also tied to a bunch of positive benefits like reducing high blood pressure and risk of certain cancers. I dare a bagel to make the same claims.
2. All natural. Checked out the label on a box of plain ol' oats lately? Even the non-organic kind has a single ingredient: oats.
3. Cheap. Even yummy deluxe organic thick rolled oats—my preferred variety—costs about a dime per serving. Go ahead, name another ten-cent breakfast.
4. Good taste. Again, forget those painful porridge memories. Forget there's even such a thing as instant oatmeal (an abomination, if you ask me). Cook up some tasty thick rolled oats—they cook pretty fast, but do stay away from the microwave for best results—and then top them with your choice of flavors. I go for butter and sea salt, but most people like sweet. A nice handful of raisins (or dried cherries, or fresh blueberries in season, or stewed apricots, or...) and a drizzle of dark rich maple syrup will do the trick nicely. Use natural sweeteners that enhance the inherent sweet nuttiness of the oats. You want to really taste them. No time in the morning? Toss your oats into the slow cooker at bedtime and wake up to a hot breakfast.
5. Go extreme. Now that you're hooked, go for the hard stuff: steel cut oats. Or whole oats (really chewy!). Or Scottish oats. Or buy oats in bulk by the 25-lb. bag.
Now go sow your own wild oats!
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I love oatmeal, especially the steel cut variety. Yum.
I eat it regularly, usually with raisins and cinnamon. Yum yum.
We love oatmeal too. And so, of course, when we first started farming,
growing oats was one of my top priorities.
Back then I had no idea what an oat looked like before it was hulled and rolled
into that little flat disk that came out of the box. I did some reading. Seems
growing oats is right up there with growing dandelions on the "even a dummy can do
it" list. Right up my alley. I prepared a little 1/4 acre plot and planted my
organic oats.
I waited. Then all this crab grass looking weed turned up. I pulled it. Day after
day I weeded that field. It was not til mid summer that I noted the unpulled weeds
along the edge of the field were growing these nice little seed head hulls. Yup, I'd pulled most all the oat crop thinking it weed.
OK, if at first you don't succeed.... The following year I tried again. I read some more. The oats grew unmolested by the weeding hoe. I waited until just past the milk stage, (puncturing the hull with a finger nail to see if a drop of white milkish looking stuff appeared), then sharpened the scythe and harvested my crop.
Now what? I did more reading. Having no grist mill on the place, I found a reference to Indians threshing their wild rice by putting it in a hole and then jumping up and down on it. I pulled an old pillow case from the linen closet, filled it with oats and slammed the sucker down onto the picnic table on the porch - over and over again. When I tired of that, I tied the end of the pillowcase
tight and starting jumping up and down on it. That technique got old pretty fast, I added Indian chants to the jumping dance just for variety. The cows stopped by to watch the show from over the pasture fence. Peaches looked at her daughters and said, "Well girls, the old lady's finally lost it altogether."
Happily, many (though not all) hulls had successfully been separated from the groats by this ancient technique. I had tired of the threshing game so decided it was time to move on to winnowing.
Well, heck, we all know how to do that. I got a pair of shallow cardboard box lids, stood where the afternoon breeze was strongest, and poured the oats from as high as I could reach, from one box lid to another. Some chaff blew off, just like it was supposed to. By the time the breeze had died, there was, though, still quite a bit left clinging to the groats in the box lid. No worries - we're modern folks and can apply technology. I located the electric hair dryer one of the daughters left here on a previous visit. I turned it to low and waved it over the stream of oats as I poured from one box to another. Chaff blew out and floated down the drive.
This too got old in a while. Even the cows were bored with the entertainment and wandered off. I had other things to do after all, so decided to speed up the process by turning the trigger on the hair dryer to high.
This speeded things up all right. Groats and chaff slammed out of the box and down the drive in the blink of an eye.
I salvaged 2 QUARTS of oat groats. Yep, 1/4 acre field and hours of post processing yielded 2 quart jars of oats. I thought them pretty clean so ran them through the little roller and prepared husband's breakfast. The fresh oatmeal tasted GREAT but did not go over well. Husband, who rarely complains about his food, picked one piece of tiny chaff out of his teeth, then another, and then concluded politely that he didn't like oatmeal that required a toothpick.
Since then, we've been buying his oatmeal at the market. However, I just got instructions for building the "Kimball Whizbang Tub-style Mechanical Chicken Plucker". I'm pretty sure the design could be modified with the addition of pieces of old hose in place of the teeth, to whip off chaff from the groats instead of feathers from the bird. The pump on the old swamp cooler died, but the fan still works. It's still sitting behind the barn. I bet it could be modified to blow off chaff while catching groats.
Hope springs eternal. One of these days, by damn I'm gonna get me some homegrown oatmeal. I just know it will taste great.
I eat it regularly, it have good taste.
http://www.fuelthemind.com/health/nutrition/nutrition.html