Its Raining Oatmeal

Let’s continue our breakfast research for the SNAP challenge. Remember, I am trying to make breakfast for $0.75 or less with all organic and/or local ingredients from Common Ground and/or the farmers’ market and I want it to include some protein and fresh fruit and/or vegetables.

I planned to move on from oatmeal already, but I have found myself unable. Since my previous post I have fallen in love with oatmeal. I use to like it just fine as a kid but as an adult I’d pretty much ignored oatmeal. This rediscovery has become something of a love affair and I’ve mixed up a few more batches with different ingredients I’d like to share with you here.

Why do I love oatmeal? Its so very filling and nutritious and cheap all at once. Honestly, what’s not to love? Well, maybe plain oatmeal isn’t so loveable, but there are so many fun nutritious things you can add to it. This next oatmeal recipe doesn’t meet my fresh fruit or veg criteria for breakfast, but it’s a very fast, simple option that will appeal to the kids.

PB&J Oatmeal
½ cup organic rolled oats from the bulk bins ($0.14)
1 scant cup water
A pinch of salt
1 T peanut butter ($0.16)
1 T all-fruit jam of your choice ($0.25)

Instructions:
Put the oats, salt, and water in a small saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat with a lid on. Once it reaches a boil, turn it down to a low simmer and let do its thing for 10 minutes. Give it a good stir, turn off the heat, and pour into your bowl. Top with the peanut butter and jam and stir well. Eat up!

Total cost: $0.55
Total calories: 309
Total time to make: 12 minutes

I tried this one with 2T jam and that was just way, way too much sugar for my tastes, I’d stick to 1T. This next recipe blows away my $0.75 or less criteria but could be fit into the budget once in a while to use up a peach that’s starting to go or just as a fresh fruit treat.

Peach Dream Oatmeal
½ cup organic rolled oats from the bulk bins ($0.14)
1 scant cup water
A pinch of salt
2T slivered almonds ($0.22)
1 small peach, diced w/peel on ($0.54)
1 T local honey ($0.14)

Instructions:
Put the oats, salt, and water in a small saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat with a lid on. Once it reaches a boil, turn it down to a low simmer and let do its thing for 10 minutes. Give it a good stir, turn off the heat, and pour into your bowl. Mix in the almonds and honey, then top with the fresh peach and serve.

Total cost: $1.02
Total calories: 366
Total time to make: 12 minutes

I actually spent this whole week eating oatmeal with a different topping every day. Other notable oatmeal bowls were Chocolate Banana, Cinnamon Pear, Cherry Almond, and Crabapple Honey. All costed out to under $0.80.

In planning for this challenge I thought over the rules carefully. One of the rules was no free food from others. Hmmm, okay, but what about free food from Mother Nature? If we’re talking about eating in C-U there is a *lot* of free fruit to be had in this area from mid-May until late Septmeber. Its amazing for how many years I never noticed this and then my friend Jessy pointed out the sour cherry trees in front of the south side of Lincoln Square Mall full of fruit just begging to be picked and something clicked for me. I began to see free mulberries everywhere and to learned that if you spread a sheet beneath a laden mulberry branch and shook you’d have pounds of berries for 10 minutes of effort. Then I learned about the blueberry’s Illinois-native cousin, the service berry. There are service berry trees all over C-U where pounds of berries can be obtained for free, my freezer is full of them! Then there are the sour cherries, the crabapples, the apples, the plums, and the pears. When you start looking for these free fruits everywhere and acknowledging them as food, suddenly you have a whole additional food source.

Now I’ve heard the argument that if everyone were aware of these sources of free fruit there would not be enough for everyone. Fair enough. But I don’t think that is a reason to discount it because everyone noticing and bothering to pick this free food is not going to happen any time soon and because, well, my family uses this source every year as a way to keep food costs down so I know it works. And all that fruit is chockfull of nutrition and flavor. For a moment imagine that our park districts and cities made a policy to use a certain percentage of food-bearing trees and bushes out of every planting they did. Yum. I know the practical reasons many cities don’t plant food trees – they are hard to mow around with all that fruit on the ground under them that falls without being picked – but perhaps its time we changed our attitude about the value of food. Perhaps its worth a little more difficulty mowing to seed our towns with free fruit? Why not get the benefit of food along with our landscaping?

I’m going to move on from my beloved oatmeal before I bore you all, if you want the recipe and cost for any of the recipes I mentioned above but did not outline let me know and I will happily pass them on. What about those of you who cannot bear hot food for breakfast when it is warm outside, for those who feel oatmeal in summer is blasphemy. Don’t fret, you are not alone in your desire for cool food on warm summer mornings and I have some ideas. I haven’t costed them out yet, but we’ll do that together and see how it goes. Tonight, I make yogurt from scratch with local Kilgus milk! I’ll share details of how it went in the next few days.

P.S. One quick tip about oatmeal – don’t ever let it harden in your pan or bowl. If you wash them out right away they are easy to clean up but dried oatmeal is much like cement. Learn from my mistakes and wash your pan and bowl right away to keep oatmeal a low-labor meal!