(Relatively) convenient steel cut oatmeal- Feed me!

Mornings and I don’t exactly get along. I am wont to hit the snooze button until well after the very last second and then stumble (late) through my morning routine. A healthy breakfast doesn’t always find it’s place in my schedule.

There are plenty of convenient breakfast foods to choose from, but a bowl of cereal or a muffin leaves me cold, particularly in wintertime. And if I eat a bowl of instant oatmeal, I’ll usually find myself hungry again in an hour. Not cool!

Steel cut oats, on the other hand, really stick to your ribs. I ate mine at 8:30 this morning, and I’m still going strong three hours later. They feature plenty of soluble fiber. Their texture is much more interesting than instant, or even Quaker Old-Fashioned, oats. The only downside? They take around 40 minutes to cook. What’s a girl to do?

For a while, I tried cooking oats a week at a time and heating them up in the morning. That worked well enough, but I found that the oats were rather dry when I reheated them, and lost much of their bite. No, I want freshly cooked oats, and I don’t want to get up 30 minutes early to have them, either. What a dilemma!

The answer to this thorny question is pre-cooking the oats the night before. Bring the oats and the cooking liquid to a boil the night before and set a cover on the pot, and the oats will be mostly cooked by morning. Then, they take but five minutes to warm up on the stove. If you’re conserving dishes, you can even eat them straight from the pot.

If I’m going to the trouble of cooking a hot meal for breakfast, I like to dress it up a bit. I usually cook my oats with soy milk and water for some added protein and a nice, creamy texture. I like to add fruit and freshly ground flax seeds (yay omega 3 fatty acids!), too. And maybe a few walnuts or almonds. But these oats are perfectly tasty on their own, too. And, to my mind, totally worth a few minutes of preparation the night before.

(Relatively) convenient steel cut oatmeal

Ingredients:

1/4 cup steel-cut oats (toasted if desired)
1 cup water or milk
optional additions:
- salt to taste
- sugar/honey/brown sugar to taste
- cinnamon
- 1/2 cup fruit (e.g., apples, fresh berries, thawed frozen fruit, dried fruit)
- ground flax seeds
- 2 tablespoons nuts (e.g., almonds, walnuts)

Directions:

If desired, toast oats carefully over medium heat in a small saucepan until fragrant, about five minutes.
Add 1 cup of water or milk to saucepan. Any combination of water, milk or soy (or other) milk will do. I use 1/2 cup soy milk + 1/2 cup water.
Bring oats to a low boil over medium high heat. If using milk or soy milk, watch carefully, as the milk will foam and boil over. Turn off burner.
Cover saucepan and let sit overnight or for several hours.
Reheat over medium heat, stirring occasionally, about five minutes.
Serve plain, or with fruit and nuts.