Munchie Monday: Apple Cider Oatmeal!

We seem to have two half-gallons of apple cider in the refrigerator.  Before the cider turns hard I decided to use up some of it.

This was an easy cooked oatmeal which we had for breakfast yesterday.  Dear One really loved it! That made me happy.

In a three-quart sauce pan, place 2 cups apple cider, 1 cup uncooked old-fashioned oatmeal, 1/2 cup golden raisins, 1/2 cup pumpkin seeds, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, and 1/4 teaspoon salt.

Stir over medium heat until the cereal is cooked as much as you like. I cooked it almost five minutes.

Serve in bowls with a few chopped walnuts on top.

Dear One asked if I could duplicate the recipe.  Well, yes. I can.  I just wrote it down so I could do that!  And thought I would share with family and friends here on the blog.  I hope you like it, too.

Food Friday: Swedish Apple Pie Again

Three years ago I blogged about a wonderful recipe:  Swedish Apple Pie.  This recipe is a treat to me, in part because two dear friends separately gave me the recipe.  Each time I make it, I think lovingly of them and am so grateful for their friendship even though one of them has crossed the veil.

This time I made it slightly differently.  Because I was concerned about how well glass would travel from Vermont to South Carolina, I left most of our glass kitchen things in Vermont.  For the most part this has not been a problem!  However, when it came to making a pie for company, I was at a loss: no pie dish.  SO...what to do?  I went to the freezer section and purchased a frozen pie crust in one of those cheap-y aluminum pie tins for this pie.  (AFTERTHOUGHT: now is the time to replace the glass pie dish!!)

To make the Swedish Apple Pie you do not normally use a pie crust.  The recipe itself makes the crust somehow.

The method is to peel and slice apples and fill the pie dish 2/3 full of apples.  Some apples are supposedly better than other apples for pies, but I just use what I have.  This time it was McIntosh apples.  Some recipes call for hard apples, or rather, apples that remain pretty hard/firm when they are cooked.  Those are not my favorite. I don't mind if the apples disintegrate into tasty apple-y mush, which is more or less what Macs do.

After the pie dish is full of apples you sprinkle on top 1/4 chopped walnuts then 1 teaspoon cinnamon followed by 1 Tablespoon of sugar which does not seem like much but is perfect. Set aside while you mix the other ingredients.

In a small bowl place 1 cup flour, 1 cup granulated sugar, 3/4 cup melted BUTTER, one egg, and 1 teaspoon vanilla if you like vanilla.  Mix well then spread over the top of the apples/walnuts/cinnamon/sugar.  It is a bit tricky (sometimes) to spread the topping evenly.  It will still taste good if it is not perfectly evenly spread.

Bake at 350 degrees F. for 35 minutes or more. I am pretty sure I cooked this one for quite a bit longer.  I just kept checking.  It wants to be nicely browned and not at all jiggly in the center.

Having the crust in the bottom of the pie pan was okay but it did make the top crust around the edges of the pan a little bit thick.  I only had one piece and thought it was fine but each piece Dear One eats, he leaves a semi-circle of that thick-ish crust on his plate or puts it down the sink.  Thus, I gather it is better to just make this pie as it is written, without a crust already in the pan...

Munchie Monday: Great Steel Cut Oats in the Instant Pot

Having a quick and easy breakfast is important to me.  Eating oatmeal every day is supposed to be great at lowering cholesterol.   Somewhere I saw a comment on someone's blog that in three months her cholesterol went from awful to normal in three months with eating oatmeal every day.  Of course, she did not say what else she was doing, but hey,  oatmeal is easy so why not give it a try.  My next doctor appointment is in three months and it will include fasting blood work, so why not?!

Today I pulled the Instant Pot inner liner out of the Instant Pot and put it on the counter.  This helps keep ingredients for getting places I don't want them!

In the bottom of the pot I put 1 cup of steel cut oats, 3 cups of water, 1/4 cup sunflower seeds,  and 1 teaspoon cinnamon then stirred them well.  Next I sprinkled on top 1/4 cup raisins, almost 1/4 cup dried cranberries, and one large apple grated.  I did NOT stir them in at this point. I just installed the cover, selected HIGH pressure and 8 minutes then went about my business.

When I got back to the pot the oats had been on the warming cycle for 15 minutes.  I took off the cover,  stirred them up, put 1/2 cup into each of two bowls and sprinkled on some chopped pecans...maybe 2 Tablespoons on each bowl.

We ate them with pleasure.  This was at around 8:30.  After the very green smoothie and the oatmeal we did not eat ago until 4:30.  Around 2:30 my stomach began to growl but I was not unpleasantly hungry.  That was very nice.

There was nearly one quart of oats left in the pot which is now waiting for tomorrow. And the rest of the week.  Pretty good deal.

Food Friday: Quick and Easy Best Hot Oatmeal Ever

Sometimes when you are researching something you need to know, other things catch your eye that you should really stop everything and review.  This is such a case.

This really is Quick and Easy!  And so good for you.  And it even tastes good.  This morning I was looking at ways to improve health through food.  Diet-food-health-they should go together, right?  So that is what I was researching.  Yet again trying to make changes for the better. I saw many testimonials by medical scientists indicating that if we just added oatmeal to our diets every day so many health improvements would take place.  Okay. I believe it.  And there, just below all those other presentations was an advertisement for the best oatmeal ever.  Maybe yes, maybe no, but it was worth trying.

This is the trick that makes this so good:  find a 2-cup storage container that has a lid. Add all the ingredients to it.  Put on the cover and shake then set aside until you want to use it...at home, in the office, on the job, in an airplane--any place you can get boiling water.


The mixture:

1/2 cup old-fashioned rolled oats
a handful of dried fruit like raisins, cranberries, whatever you like
1 Tablespoon ground flax meal or chia seeds
1 Tablespoon or less  brown sugar
1-2 Tablespoons chopped nuts or seeds (more if you are not using the flax or chia)
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Put on the cover and shake well.

Boil water.  Fifteen to twenty minutes before you want to eat the oatmeal pour the hot water over it.  I put about 1 cup onto the oatmeal, covered tightly, then, holding the cover on with both hands, gave it a shake or two then set on the table with a spoon so we could eat it when we were ready.

This was our first bowl.  It was good.  We did not pour on any milk and it was still lovely.

Works like a charm!  So good.  And if a bowl of oatmeal can repair a fatty liver, diabetes, bad sleep, what have you, then it is an easy pill to swallow.

Munchie Monday: Old-Fashioned Oatmeal in the Microwave

A new anything is a good time to make improvements in one's life:  a new year, a new month, a new week, a new day, a new job, anything is a good excuse to get it together.

In any case, I decided to get more serious about eating good food.  Well, just about EVERYTHING I eat is good,  just not necessarily  good FOR me!  So today, since I had started a stove-top cleaning project and could not use that triple apple oatmeal cake that I told you about for cereal that I have in the freezer waiting for just such a morning as this, I decided to try oatmeal in the microwave.

This is what I did:

1. In a very large glass bowl I put 2 cups unsweetened almond milk, 1 cup old-fashioned rolled oats, and a pinch of salt. I stirred it, put on the plastic keep-the-microwave-clean cover that I discovered here in Oregon (why aren't there any of these covers in New England?  Or why did I not see them before?  They are a wonderful gadget that was in the apartment when we arrived.  I immediately got a new one and put it in my closet to wait until we get home. I hope I don't find too many other things to store until we go home or we will have to trade in our car for a truck.  Not a bad idea, actually...!)

2. Let the microwave cook for 2 minutes, then stirred. Nowhere near ready.

3.  Let cook for 2 more minutes.  Stirred.  Added 1/2 cup raisins and stirred again.

4.  Let cook for 2 more minutes.  Stirred. STILL not ready.

5.  Let cook for 2 MORE minutes.  FINALLY it was ready.

After stirring well, I put 1 cup or a tad more into each of two bowls.  I broke up about 2 Tablespoons walnuts onto the top of the cereal the added 1 Tablespoon ground flax seed.  At this point I got out the  jar of cinnamon honey paste I made last week. I put a small teaspoon on mine and stirred it it.  I won't say how much Dear One stirred into his bowl!  But it was enough.

This was really good.  If you have a higher-grade microwave, it probably won't take your oatmeal 8 minutes to cook.  Also if you are only making one serving, it won't take as long, but I would check every 2 minutes.

Munchie Monday: Cinnamon Toast Roll-ups

Today is a snowy day in central Vermont.  It has been snowing for about five hours.  Snow is mounting up, to some extent.  It is a day when you want to do something productive but not necessarily outdoors.  What I decided to do was experiment with food!  Sometimes we get a winner, though more often, not!

Today I decided to make cinnamon toast roll-ups as a possible early morning food offering.

Cinnamon Toast Roll-ups--some with crusts on, some with no crusts.

This is the process:

Collect ingredients and tools.
--store bought "Wonder"-type bread, it can be on the stale side--though if it is colorful (i.e. moldy), probably set that slice aside to innoculate the birds from pneumonia...
--very soft butter
--shaker bottle of cinnamon and sugar (to make your own: mix 1/4 cup sugar with 1 Tablespoon cinnamon and shake well.  You can vary the proportion of sugar to cinnamon to suit your taste.)
--rolling pin
--cookie sheet
--parchment paper, if you like
--knife, or other "spreader" for the butter

Start to pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees F.

On a clean counter top, use the rolling pin to roll out one slice of bread to flatten it. Leave the crust on, or take it off if you want.  With the knife,  spread the soft butter to the edges of the mashed slice of bread.  Sprinkle on the cinnamon sugar then roll up gently into a tight-ish roll.  Place "seam side" down on the parchment-paper-covered cookie sheet.  Spread more butter on the top of the roll-up.

Continue to do this until you have made all the roll-ups you want.

Bake in the preheated 350 degree F. oven for 10 minutes, but check after 5 minutes and 8 minutes to make sure they are not too brown.  The pictured roll-ups could have used more time in the oven, at least they were not as brown as I wanted them to be but I was too gutless to leave them in longer.  Experiments are fun but I am rather averse to food disasters...which can happen when food is in the oven even a little bit too long.  I prefer a little under-cooked to burned to a crisp.  These had a nice little brown seam side though.

Serve.

One thing to remember:  these things go down really quickly.  Just remember that you are eating a whole slice of bread, maybe very fast....

I cannot give you a report on Dear One's opinion.  I can only say that I just checked the bowl (he has gone out for a walk in the snow) and found:  empty!  I do not think he realized that each roll was one slice of bread.  Note the previous paragraph about fast consumption.

New Health Find...infused water

Last Sunday Debbie asked me if I had ever tried infused water.  Since I had never heard of it, I said so.  She said to take a nice 2 quart glass bottle and put a very thinly sliced apple of any kind (I used a Pink Lady since that is what I had) in the bottom of the jar.  Toss in one stick of cinnamon, fill the jar with water, cover and refrigerate. In an hour, pour yourself a glass of lovely lightly flavored infused water.  I loved it!

You can refill the jar three or four times.  By the time the apple slices begin to brown you might want to remove them and start with a new apple and cinnamon stick...

Since I love lemon, I tried putting a sliced lemon in the bottom of a jar along with about an inch of finely sliced fresh ginger and let it refrigerate.  That one was really good, too.

If any readers have suggestions of other good flavors of infused water, send comments!

Thanks.  And thanks, Debbie, for a treat that will most likely be a rest of my life sort of thing!