Oatmeal and Ursula

   I would be sorely misleading if I gave anyone the impression that my circumference of thought did not include food! The main problem being I have no talent and neither does my camera for taking pictures of food. Something that is warm and smells divine when clicked by my camera becomes cold, flat and tasteless, I need a camera that also detects smell and temperature, some people have this knack...I will have to keep practicing or just rely on words for some recipes.
   
Recipe #1 Oatmeal.
   Oatmeal and I have had a love/hate relationship until recently. When I was young it was the stuff you ate so you could eat more of the stuff you wanted to as in, "Mom can I have Alphabets for breakfast?" "After you eat your oatmeal you can have any cereal you want."
    Once some friends were visiting from out of town and we made a big pot of oatmeal because being good children we knew the rule and wanted to eat lots and lots of sugar cereal, so we made a huge pot of oatmeal because we all were "starving" probably about 10 cups of it and added about 10 times too much salt. It was awful. Our hopes of sugar cereal vanished with one taste but luckily for me one of the children volunteered to eat the whole pot in order for us all to have any cereal we wanted, we cheered her on and we all got the cereal(s) of our choice (except for her as she was too full to even think of eating applejack's)
  I have tired just about every oatmeal variation I could come up with, my favorite for a while was oatmeal with jam in it.
   One day oatmeal changed from what you eat because it's good for you to what you eat because it's good. I was visiting an elderly lady who was a friend of my fiance, she invited us over for breakfast and of course the first course of breakfast was...you guessed it, oatmeal which was the point I started looking around for mini-wheats but the oatmeal was delicious, nutty and creamy and actually tasted really good. Like the polite, modest lady she is when I asked her how to make it she just said, "oh it's just oatmeal, would you like some more?"
   So my quest to make oatmeal began, cooked hot, cooked slow, cooked in milk, thick oats, quick oats, thin oats, served with sugar, served with butter, served with cream, none measured up.
Recently though I think I have found it, or else it has been so long that I have forgotten what the original tasted like but either way this is excellent oatmeal especially on these cool mornings.

1 Cup Steel Cut Oats
1 TBSP Yogurt - as plain and pure as you can get
1 1/2 Cups room temperature water
Mix the yogurt onto the chunks of oats with a spoon till the oats are all coated, add room temperature water, cover with a cloth or plate, let sit on the counter about 12 hours or all night.
 Boil 1 1/2 cups of water, add soaked oatmeal mixture bring back to a boil then turn down heat and simmer for about 10-15 minutes.
Serve with butter, maple syrup or brown sugar and milk.

Serves 2-4 depending on how much of a morning appetite you have or how much sugar cereal your children are drooling over.