Vindication! I am not the only person who chooses steel-cut oatmeal over the efficient varieties on the market. At the store recently, Jo gestured to some "quick oats" with a "hint hint" and I'd have to agree, he has a point. But if prepared correctly, cooked in milk and some (read a good amount of) maple syrup, the result is as close to rice pudding for breakfast as you can get without eating rice pudding for breakfast. Which also works. What doesn't work: getting the pot totally clean after a weeks-long oatmeal-as-pudding kick. Dreams of my dishwasher, indeed.
In other culinary news, Chelsea Thai has the absolute best food I have ever eaten, ever. I don't understand it. There's something in the Pad Gra Prow that makes going from Park Slope to the Meatpacking district for lunch seem reasonable. I believe I was even talking about this Thai food in DC, frustrated that even with the Megabus, it was not an option. I want someone more knowledgeable about Thai food than I am (trained as I was on Hyde Park's finest) to taste the dish and tell me what ingredient is making it so much better than all other food, so that I can pour it on everything. Except maybe the oatmeal. Chelsea Thai sells a wide range of Thai-food sauces, but going through them one by one seems inefficient.
And, in the final culinary news of the day, suggestible viewer of NYT Video that I am, I insisted we pick up, at the kitchen-goods store in Chelsea Market, a ketchup-type squirt bottle to store salad dressing in. Was it worth the dollar? Only time will tell. We saw, but did not buy, although it was tempting, little glass bowls like the ones Mark Bittman (see Item 1) uses in his Minimalist cooking videos. (This reminds me, to finish up the post, that for dinner I once again made salade nicoise, and this time, thanks to Jill Santopietro's dressing method, the results not only tasted good, but did not look like they'd been vomited on.) Making a meal by tossing in pre-chopped ingredients from little glass bowls into larger glass bowls looks like it would be fun to do at home, to pretend one had one's own cooking show, but this, like everything, will have to wait for The Dishwasher.
Our dishwasher is very nice, I love it, but it does NOT clean the oatmeal off our double boiler. We have to grind it off with a steel wool sponge, just like grandma. dave.s.
ReplyDeleteWho is dave s.? This is or is not the Debate Link blogger?
ReplyDeleteSo far, the pot in question is resistant to our usual pot-stain-removing all-powerful sponge-to-end-all-sponges. So yeah, a dishwasher probably wouldn't do it, either.
Not Mr Debate Link. Middle aged civil servant, kids, wife. Opinions, so I write to blogs. About the oatmeal: try boiling water with dish soap in the pot for five minutes, then it comes off pretty easily. dave.s.
ReplyDeleteIf you enjoy steel-cut oatmeal, (which I do), you should really invest in a neuro-fuzzy rice cooker.
ReplyDeleteIt makes perfect steel-cut oatmeal with zero human intervention, is incredibly easy and quick to clean, keeps the oats warm and tasty for hours, and can even be set on a timer to have oats ready for you when you wake up. Not to mention that it also cooks rice and risotto, and can be used as a steam cooker for veggies, fish, and other items.
They may seem pricy at first, but you'll use it enough on oats and rice to save more money on your overall food bill in a year's time than what it costs. I use mine five times a week.
I'm generally opposed to fancy kitchen appliances due to cost, counter space concerns, and cleaning time. But this one is the exception...