Savory Oatmeal

Oatmeal is one of the many foods that, as an adult, I've tasted again for the first time. That's because what we called oatmeal growing up was in fact a packet of sugar with perhaps a few oats thrown in for effect.

Any time a dish that isn't a dessert is served on the sweet side, you should be skeptical. Remember, sugar hasn't been around in our part of the world forever, so its presence often implies an altercation of the original. Just compare what "cereal" meant a hundred years ago to what it means for American kids today.

My earliest memories of oatmeal involve pouring hot tap water into a pulverized, artificially "apple and cinnamon" flavored, pre-cooked powder. I first went savory when a Scottish friend told me of his native oat preparation (egg, black pepper, cheddar), and I will never go back.

Many times a week, I cook whole oats on the stove top in a 2:1 water to oat ratio. When they're just cooked through but not yet mushy, I take them off heat and enjoy with coarse sea salt, tons of black pepper, and a generous tablespoon or so of oil. The oats are so large and toothsome that I often eat them on a plate, with a fork. The ancient simplicity of the meal - a grain and oil - is almost Biblical. It's hearty, it's fortifying, and it's real food.

Again, Savory Oatmeal

I know I've written about this before, but I would feel dishonest if I didn't yet again emphasize how great savory oats are. So great that I eat them more days than not.

For anyone still going sweet, I strongly suggest that you liberate your avena sativa from such dubious (and often artificial) flavors like "cinnamon and spice." Cinnamon is a spice!

My most basic oats are simmered in a 2:1 ratio of salted water to oat, then drizzled with a little olive oil. It'll put hair on your chest, and if you already have hair on your chest, it will keep it there. And if you want to get fancy, crack an egg in there and whip it around until it mixes with the grain and fluffs things up.

Another simple yet excellent variation is to drop a thin slab of cheddar on the just cooked oats. I adore the way the cheese softens, breaks apart, and becomes one with the grain. For a bit of an eye opener, dust heavily with freshly cracked black pepper.

You'll never be able to eat anything called Raspberry Streusel Oatmeal To Go again.

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Recipe: Savory Oatmeal for One

1/2 cup oats
1 cup water
a dash of salt (or two pinches)
1 slice of cheddar
black pepper
(and/or 1 egg)

Bring the salted water to a boil, add the oats, reduce heat and simmer.

When the water has been absorbed and the oats are soft but still toothsome, pour them out into a bowl or small plate with the help of one of those flexible rubber scrapers.

Top with cheese and as much black pepper as you can handle that early in the morning.

If you want to include an egg, add it just before turning off the heat and stir vigorously until it disappears. Look for bits of white to know that it has cooked through.

Let dog lick bowl.

Flatbreakfast

Elise's pizza is so good that there's never any to spare. But sometimes she makes a little extra dough for later use which allows us to experience the splendor all over again.

If you're going to go through the trouble of making pizza dough (which really isn't any harder than watching Hulu), you'd might as well make extra. It keeps for a while in the fridge, for even longer in the freezer, and will last forever in your memory of what a delightful experience it was.

Having pizza from leftover dough is like getting one more visit from someone who you love but who is dead. In fact it's even better since you can eat the pizza and can't eat the ghost, unless of course you're Pac-Man.

There was the time Elise made those delightful little rolls, and more recently we had flatbread with za'atar (aka zaatar, za'tar, zatar, zatr, zahatar, zaktar and satar but not satyr) for breakfast. With the dough already made, all we had to do was heat up the oven and slide it in while we went about our morning routine. In about as much time as it takes to make oatmeal, we had a fresh, hot, steamy, crusty, za'atary breakfast.

Make pizza dough on the weekend. Make flatbread for breakfast during the week. Die happy. Then come back and visit someone who you really loved and teach them to do the same. Then get eaten by Pac-Man.

My Freezer

Spring has sprung, and since even the most stubborn mountains of snow in the corners of parking lots are beginning to ebb, what better time to scrutinize the contents of one's freezer. In the confessional spirit of Bittman and the IFA, I thought I'd do so publicly.

As you can see from the photo, we're well stocked. Literally: most of what you see is stock. Like many others, I keep a container of carcasses in the freezer and add bones, pan drippings, skin and such until it's full, at which point I cook it down into rich and delicious golden-brown chicken liquor. I like to think of every time I make stock as a sort of mini festival. Stockstock, if you will.

When it comes to stock, it's all about something-from-nothing. I won't add anything that has to be purchased anew (fresh meat) or could simply be eaten as is (celery). To me, stock exists not to be adulterated but to give waning ingredients a second chance. And which is the more noble way to treat a bird: throwing it in the trash or wringing its corpse for a few more drops of flavor and nutrition?

The white paper packages with red labels indicate another sub-zero staple: meat from Codman, a local, sustainable farm. A full blown vegetarian diet may seem better for the environment, but I still see animals as having a key role in the closed loop of sustainable farming. Plus, we don't eat too much of it, and the amount of red meat that you see in the photo will last us for weeks.

In addition to saving food for later, freezers can also serve as a purgatory for undesirable but not entirely unwanted items. Like the spiced rice I made for the Tu B'Shevat seder. It was good, but not great. Hence it lies enshrined in an icy tomb until I make myself -- or the bacteria in the compost bin -- eat it.

There's also some partially defrosted grapefruit sorbet that has separated into syrup and ice. I'm throwing it out as soon as I finish this post.

Between the identical rectangular tubs of stock and the yogurt containers (also full of stock), you'll see a heel of Elise's excellent oatmeal bread. It's so good that I don't know how it wasn't gobbled up fresh, but I'll be toasting it this afternoon.

In the background you'll notice a few amorphous plastic bags lurking. One contains hunks of pumpkin, the others are full of shrimp tails and pea pods, destined for (separate) stocks. There's one item in tinfoil that I can't identify. I don't know what's in it, and I don't think I'll find out.

At top right you'll see a container of the buffalo yam chili, and there are several items on the door rendered invisible by the angle of the shot. These include balls of dough, frozen jugs of slightly expired goat milk, the tough part of a chicken of the woods, the fat from my duck proscuitto -- too granular -- and of course vodka.

What I've learned from this exercise is that most of the skeletons in my closet belong to chickens. It seems my freezer is essentially a repository for stock, ingredients for stock, and things I didn't have the heart to get rid of but might still have a role to play in future meals.

Duck fat-goat milk-chicken of the woods-vodka pudding, anyone?

It Ain't All Chez Panisse

To fill you in a little on my relationship with food, I thought I'd switch things up and post about some of the things I actually don't like to eat. Sadly, this is a category into which most of my meals fall.

The reason I'm so enchanted with good food is that, given the amount I travel, I rarely get it. I come to nice meals not from a place of comfort and stability, but from depravity and misery. I come crawling.

For every slowly simmered crockpot stew I write about, there's a whole lot of cold, plain oatmeal eaten on my lap at an airport, with chopsticks. And that's a good day.

I see a world on fire, and I see food as a way to still see the good in it. Additionally, I see responsible, ethical, sustainable food as a way to, in part, save ourselves from ourselves, as the Lakota holy man Lame Deer once said. Every morning, when my NYTimes homepage comes up, I look with horror at the news of the day. Afghanistan, Iraq, Tibet, Darfur, New Orleans - you name it.

Then I see a ray of light: the food section.

Food On Fire

The summer of campfire cooking has come to its fiery climax.

Last weekend I was in the Finger Lakes for an assignment and for what passes for a bachelor party these days: hiking, dining, wine tasting and reading poetry. Well, dirty poetry.



On the first night we made dinner on the campfire using entirely local ingredients. For dessert I baked a blueberry free form tart with a rye crust on top of stones in a Dutch oven, which we nestled in the coals and covered with a smoldering log. It wasn't the best thing I've ever had, but the fact that it worked at all was kind of amazing. I had picked up the technique from my story on the Revolutionary War reenactment cook. (The skillet was for presentation -- it really did bake on rocks.)



Also delicious were some crostini we seared in fat leftover from frying ham. (The topping was the fat.)



On the second night we dined out but returned to the campsite to sit around the fire. As the flames died out, we were left with a bed of perfect cooking coals, and even though it was one in the morning and no one needed any more nutrition, we couldn't resist.

We started by searing a small block of scrapple, which accomplished two purposes. First, it made the scrapple more appetizing, warming the slightly gelatinous meat and giving it a nice crust. Second, it dried the scrapple out after it had sloshed around in the bottom of a cooler for a while. Does that kind of logic apply at bachelorette parties, too?

As the scrapple sizzled, one of our party was struck by a bolt of genius, which resulted in the scrapple being struck by a bolt of fire. I believe the phrase "flambé that sh*t" was uttered. Never before had I heard the word flambé used as a command, and never had it seemed like such a good idea.

I stuck the long stick we'd been using as a poker into the coals until it was aflame. We splashed rye whiskey into the iron skillet containing the scrapple, which sat directly atop the glowing coals. I touched the fiery stick to the alcohol, and voilà! Was it the world's first scrapple flambé? Probably not, but Google seems to think so. And it was insanely good.

But when you've been drinking tiny amounts of Riesling all day and sipping on rye by the campfire, you can't flambé just once. My mind raced as to what else we had that could be set on fire and consumed -- oatmeal, Terra chips, a watermelon? And then it hit me: bananas.

Soon a larger iron skillet was sizzling with a fat lump of local pasture butter we'd pick up earlier. In went two ripe bananas that had been warming in a hot car all day. They quickly browned, and once flipped, I doused them with a dangerous amount of Glen Thunder, a corn whiskey from the region's only distillery. The poker stick was again lit on fire. The flame was passed to the pan, and along with the alcohol, Dave's previous life as a bachelor disappeared in a pillar of fire.

We reduced the jus that had accumulated in the pan, took the skillet off the coals and drizzled the bananas with local honey. What had started as a terrible/wonderful idea turned into one of the best desserts I'd ever had a hand in. Call it corn whiskey campfire bananas foster sans a la mode. We stood around the pan with a flashlight and gobbled them up. If it wouldn't have caught my tongue on fire, I would have licked the pan.

You're Welcome, Mark Bittman

After months of posting about the wonders of savory breakfasts, especially oatmeal, my contributions to the culinary world have finally been recognized by none other that Mark Bittman. In his latest Minimalist column, Bittman publicly thanks me in no uncertain terms. I quote:

"Here are a few more fast ideas for savory, mostly whole-grain breakfasts some of which come from readers of my blog, Bitten — for these I say a general “thanks”.

You're welcome, Mark.

True to form, today began with savory oats. Salt, barely cracked pepper -- more like quartered peppercorns -- and a seriously fried egg on top. In fact I don't think I've ever fried an egg as hard as I (accidentally) did this morning, yet the yolk remained soft to the point of spilling out over the oats. It was quite possibly the best oat and egg combo I've tried yet, and on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from whipping them together as I usually do.

Why don't I make oats and eggs like that every time? Because I'm stupid. Nothing else could explain it.

Let me know if you need any more pointers, Bitty.

Breaded Pork Chop, Fried Potatoes, Black Pepper and Cheddar Oatmeal and Steamed Watercress with Homemade Ginger Apple Sauce, Meyer Lemon and Sacrilege

Incidentally, that's the absolute size limit for a title on a blogger post. It sounds like a lot, but I hadn't had a square meal in a couple days and it's what I conceived of while driving home. And it didn't take long: a half hour after entering the kitchen, it was in my mouth.

While buying supplies at Pemberton Farms, I was faced with a moral dilemma (this happens to me a lot while food shopping). I could buy a chicken breast, which, coming from an animal considered Kosher by Jewish law, was much more in my comfort zone. Or, I could buy a pork chop. The catch was that the pork was naturally raised, while the chicken, despite having the lord's okay, was not.

I was suddenly confronted by the dichotomy between kosher and what some now call eco-kosher. I could eat something that had been factory farmed with quantifiable damage done to the environment via pollution, chemical additives in feed and in preservatives, not to mention inhumane conditions for the animal, but which was allegedly sanctioned by word of god some thousands of years ago. Or, I could buy meat from an "unclean" animal which had been raised in a humane and environmentally friendly manner. The moral imperative was clear.

I was very happy with my choice in this meal, and it was very good. As of this writing, god has yet to strike me dead, which he/she could easily do through the homemade applesauce, which you may recall had no guarantee of not being tainted with botulism.