March 15, 2013 | By Adam Roberts | 24 Comments
Look, I’m going to level with you. These are pretty pictures I took last weekend, on a Sunday morning, after I’d made coffee for myself and read the Sunday New York Times and decided I wanted some breakfast. In the refrigerator, I had leftover English Porridge from April Bloomfield’s cookbook, with its great salty sweet kick. Instead of heating it back up, I thought: “What if I turn it into pancakes? Oatmeal pancakes?” Seemed reasonable enough.
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August 31, 2012 | By Adam Roberts | 5 Comments
If you’ve never purchased a vanilla bean, sliced it open with a paring knife, scraped the seeds out and dropped them, with the pod, into a pot of milk or cream which you then heat for an ice cream base or a custard or a pudding, you’re missing out on a great food moment. The smell is comforting, pure and sweet–the total opposite of what you get when you light one of those synthetic vanilla candles–and there’s a visual spectacle as the black vanilla seeds permeate the white liquid. Having purchased vanilla beans on sale at Penzey’s in Seattle (3 of them for $9), I decided to go for a vanilla bean moment last Sunday morning with a pot of oatmeal.
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May 4, 2012 | By Adam Roberts | 1 Comment
As someone who’s starred in “Oliver” twice–as Oliver in 5th grade and Fagan in 7th grade–I know a thing or two about porridge (aka: “gruel”). Rule one: don’t ask for “more” or you’ll be dragged by your ear out into the snow and sold to a mortician. Rule two: it’s best not served from a giant vat in the middle of a workhouse; it tastes much better–in fact it tastes quite terrific–if you follow the following instructions from April Bloomfield’s glorious new cookbook, A Girl and Her Pig.
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March 30, 2012 | By Adam Roberts | 0 Comments
It’s hard to follow up a post about pushing the genre of food blogging forward without feeling self-conscious. So let’s talk about oatmeal.
Do you like oatmeal? I love it. On Sunday mornings, sometimes I’ll make my Sunday Morning Oatmeal where I cook the oatmeal in milk, stir in butter, and top it with nuts, dried fruit and honey. When I’m feeling innovative, I’ll noodle around with the components and come up with something like my Oatmeal with Ginger, Coconut Milk and Lime. Mostly, though, I just cook oatmeal and then stir something into it–which is what this post is about.
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June 8, 2011 | By Adam Roberts | 0 Comments
It’s easy to innovate when you’re working with a set formula. Oatmeal has a set formula. Bring 1 and 3/4 cups water (or milk) to a boil, add a pinch of salt, add your rolled oats, lower to a simmer, stir and cook until your oatmeal’s absorbed most of the liquid. Then sweeten with a little brown sugar, syrup or honey and you’ve got oatmeal.
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March 29, 2011 | By Adam Roberts | 0 Comments
The idea of a natural sweetener isn’t a concept that resonates particularly well with my family. “Can you pass the Equal?” “Is there a Splenda?” These are words you will hear often if you ever eat with my mother or grandmother. And when I put that brown “raw” sugar packet in my coffee? I may get scolded with: “Why do you have to use sugar? It’s fattening!”
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January 28, 2011 | By Adam Roberts | 0 Comments
It’s such a simple idea, the kind of idea that makes you wonder why you didn’t think of it before.
I got the idea from Kim Boyce’s marvelous baking book, “Good To The Grain” (the winner of Food52′s Piglet tournament of cookbooks.) From the title of this post, I think you’ve sussed it out; the idea is to toast your oatmeal before you cook it.
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November 19, 2010 | By Adam Roberts | 0 Comments
Sunday Morning Oatmeal is not your average, every day oatmeal. It’s an oatmeal that, if you ate it every day, might kill you. But on Sunday morning, death is the furthest thing from your mind; you’ve got the Sunday Times Magazine crossword puzzle open on the table next to you (you look for all the food clues first, naturally) and Bon Iver playing on iTunes (well, Craig does, I just liked it and asked “What is this?” and he said “Bon Iver.”) There’s no set formula for this Sunday Morning Oatmeal, you just wing it as you go. But it’s best if you start the night before, right before you go to bed.
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