Monday, April 5, 2010

Creating Convenience

Living in a world that doesn't cater to someone with as many food allergies as myself I often find that what's missing most from my life isn't pizza and bagels but the convenience of "easy" food. Pretty much everything I eat I make myself, often from scratch. One of the things I used to really love was those little packets of brown sugar & maple flavored oatmeal. They were easy, portable and tasty. Now of course no such product is readily available to me. So what's a girl to do? Why, make your own of course!

Because I garden and have excess produce I've recently gotten into canning as a way to save the harvest. In the off season those empty mason jars really do start to make a bother of themselves. So I've found ways of putting them to good use in my quest for convenience.

In an effort to replace my hot oatmeal I've been eating Bob's Red Mill, Buckwheat Groats. In and of themselves they're rather bland and gooey. Not to say I don't like that in a hot breakfast cereal but I also like variety too. It's the spice of life after all! Also I'm lazy on most days so what I want is to grab a "flavor" off the shelf, pour it in a bowl, add water, nuke, and add (non-dairy) creamer. Like batch cooking I do this about twice a month. I get as many jars as I can find or just fill them till I run out of groats.

BASE RECIPE
1/4 cup scoop of groats
1 TBL brown sugar
1 tsp ground flax seed
1 tsp pumpkin pie spice or cinnamon or cardamum depending...

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...then comes the fun part!

To one jar I might add craisins, another jar gets coco and instant coffee, another chopped dates and walnuts, I might leave leave one plain. One of these days I really want to try a coconut flakes, cashews and chocolate chips. I just keep forgetting to put the coconut and cashews on the grocery list. The variations are endless... any dried fruit, nuts, seeds, etc... will work just fine. The limit is only your imagination!

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2 comments:

Unknown said...

I have been looking for something like this!! How much water and milk do you use? Cook for how long? Thanks!!

Grain Damaged said...

1/4 cup of groats to 3/4 cup of water to heat. It doesn't work very well when heated with milk. I usually add a little bit of cream after it's done cooking or sometimes if I'm feeling "fancy" I'll use whipped cream. =)

I usually nuke it too for about 4 minutes but I have a very OLD microwave... probably with a newish microwave it'd take about half that time. You'll just have to cook and stir it till it looks done.