Oatmeal Revelations

There are 41 breakfast menus in the vintage cookbook I leafed through yesterday, so it didn't take me very long to find one that would be compatible with the contents of my cupboards.

Stewed Apricots
Oatmeal
Toast
Milk, Coffee

There are breakfast menus suggested for weekends and breakfast menus suggested for weekdays. I decided to choose one of the weekday menus, hoping they would be easier for somebody just getting started with the whole cooking-a-meal-and-eating-before-noon thing.

I gather the milk is meant as a children's beverage with coffee for grown-ups, so I fired up Mr. Coffee and brewed a pot. This step is definitely something I won't be doing at home on weekday mornings. There's plenty of free java at work - and lots more time while I'm sitting at my desk to enjoy it. Unless I start getting up with at least an extra hour to spare, it's hard to imagine being able to really enjoy a pot of coffee at home. Now, for a '40s housewife, having a pot of coffee on hand would make sense. You and Jim would enjoy a cup or two at breakfast, and you could have a second later on that morning. Jim might read the morning paper at the breakfast table and so he'd be there long enough to really enjoy a cup himself. I don't get a paper here at home, so I turned on my 1950 Zenith tabletop radio and listened to NPR while I ate my breakfast - but hadn't planned my time wisely this morning, so had to eat pretty quickly and head out.

Adaptation
The combination of apricots, oatmeal, and toast seemed a little excessive in the carb department, so I skipped the toast. And the meal was more than filling as is. Looking ahead at a few of the menus, I suspect I'm going to have to make more than a few adaptations in the interest of my waistline. Maybe I should have prepared a much smaller serving of apricots and oatmeal - then a single piece of toast would've seemed okay...

Lessons Learned
1.) My 21st-century tastebuds were screaming for me to add something crunchy to the oatmeal. I had a hard time not adding some chopped walnuts, just to make the texture a little more --- I don't know. Modern recipes are usually packed with such a combination of ingredients that stripping them down to something more plain is difficult at first, I guess.

2.) Dried or preserved fruits would have likely been all there was available in the way of fruit during the winter. It's so easy in 2008 just to pick up a few fresh apricots at the supermarket. While I watched the apricots bubbling away on the stovetop this morning, I wished that I could just have added some fresh fruit to my oatmeal. It would have seemed so much healthier - and tastier! The stewed fruits weren't bad, though. They were a little chewy even after 40 minutes on the burner. The insides were still quite sweet and apriocot-y. My cookbook recommended adding sugar "to taste" during the last five minutes of stewing, but I thought the apricots were fine without any added sweetener.

3.) At last! I think I've finally figured out why my mom's oatmeal was always so gummy (sorry, Ma)... I used the real stuff today - no instant oats, no quick-cooking oats - just plain rolled oats. And the recipe on the carton specifically says to bring the water to a boil first before adding the oats and bringing everything down a simmer. I didn't do this the first time. Just threw everything in together and turned the heat up. In only a few minutes, it was bubbling and already looking just as gummy as the oatmeal I hated when I was a kid. I followed the instructions when I made the second batch, and it was an entirely different bowl of oatmeal. Could that really have made such a difference?