Steel cut oatmeal

Oatmeal with brown sugar

Growing up, I took for granted that oatmeal came prepackaged in little packets with sugar. This was the only way I knew them as they were a staple quick breakfast before Mom would pack my sister and I up to go scurrying out the door before school. As an adult, I discovered steel cut oatmeal and had an epiphany. THIS was what oat porridge was supposed to taste like. The beautiful, hearty oatmeal with a nutty, whole grain fullness made me change the way I think about oatmeal.

A good bowl of steel cut oatmeal with just a touch of brown sugar or maple syrup is one of my favorite ways to start the day. Oatmeal is especially forgiving of being made days before and reheated before service. Since The Hubs ™ can’t stand oatmeal and The Little Empress also doesn’t seem to care for it, I don’t cook a lot of it at a time. I usually boil up a cup of steel cut oats on Sunday evening to pack away for quick weekday morning breakfasts.

Or at least, that was my grand plan. More often than not, my steel cut oats never came out quite the way I wanted them. I almost always burned the bottom of the pot of oats, no matter how gentle my simmer was.

One day, I got wise and figured that I’d simply cook my steel cut oats in my crock pot as so many other people had done. I remember being particularly smug a few weeks ago as I placed oats and water with a dash of salt into my crockpot to simmer away until breakfast the next morning. The next morning, unfortunately, ended up being a Monday of Mondays. A quick peek at my oats showed them perfectly cooked at 6:00AM but by 9:30AM (when I was able to sit down and eat), they had turned into wallpaper paste.

Damn.

A disappointed forum post later and someone suggested that I try cooking my oatmeal in a rice cooker. What a brilliant idea!! I have one of those fancy-pants Japanese rice cookers that can do everything but have your child and huzzah, it had a porridge setting! I was advised to use the porridge setting and a 1:3 ratio of oats to water.

Crossing my fingers next Monday morning, I put everything into the rice cooker, selected Porridge and pressed Start amidst our usual chaos.

About an hour and a half later, The Little Empress was safely at school and I was digging in to a delicious, perfectly cooked bowl of steel cut oatmeal. YUM!