My quinoa won’t win any awards for being photogenic (you’ll notice I don’t have a picture for this post, although that has something to do with the Mini Foodie monopolizing my time and my photographic skills at the moment), and sometimes it doesn’t come out the ideal al dente texture. But I can have a healthy and satisfying one-pot meal ready in 45 minutes start to finish with only 10 minutes of my attention needed, less if I make plain quinoa with veggie stock in the rice cooker and top it with things as I eat each serving. (I’ve been doing this since our Mini Foodie came so I don’t have to be worried about needing to tend the pot when the timer goes off.)

With it’s complete protein so rare in the plant world, quinoa is the perfect side dish upgrade for vegetarians, vegans or anyone who would like to pack a little more protein in where they’d normally use rice or even couscous. It has a nice and nutty but not overpowering flavor and a pleasant texture, which makes it easy to tailor to whatever cuisine you’re craving. I’ve made butternut squash quinoa, Indian curry quinoa, Mexican quinoa, Italian quinoa, even a Thai curry quinoa that was surprisingly delicious, all from things I had in my pantry.

These are some of my favorite combinations:

• Butternut squash soup, raisins and curry powder, served with diced crisp, raw apple on top.
• Roasted red pepper soup, canned black beans, frozen corn (especially the fire roasted stuff from Trader Joe’s), cumin, salsa.
• Roasted red pepper soup, canned garbanzo beans, whatever fresh or frozen veggies I have lying around, thyme or basil.
• Vegetable stock and soy sauce, topped with anything remotely stir fry-esque.
• Cooked with vegetable stock and topped with pico de gallo, roasted red pepper strips and avocado slices, or simply a mild but flavorful hot sauce from Chris’ collection.
• Cooled, with an olive oil vinaigrette, diced celery and peas.
• Whatever I see when I open my cupboard doors. This is a great way to try out the flavors of a recipe you’ve read about but don’t have the ingredients, time or inclination to go to the trouble of making.

Ingredients:

1-2 tablespoons of butter or olive oil (optional if you aren’t cooking any fresh vegetables, including the onion)
1/2 large onion, roughly chopped (optional)
1 tablespoon minced garlic (optional)
2 cups quinoa
4 cups liquid (one tetra pack carton of soup or stock)
Add-ins of your choice (optional): fresh, frozen or canned vegetables, canned beans, olives, diced peppers, curry paste, fresh or dried herbs, spices, ground pepper, hot sauce, prepared simmer sauces, etc.
Salt to taste

Method

1. Add the olive oil or butter (if using) to a large sauce pan over medium heat. Add the onion (if you’re using it) and saute until translucent. Add the garlic (again, if using) when the onion is nearly, but not quite, cooked.
2. Toast the quinoa in the pot at this point, or in a dry pot if you’re not using the oil/butter and onion/garlic, until you can smell a light toasty, nutty aroma.
3. Add your cooking liquid and bring to a boil. Add anything else you want to put in at this point, except the salt, which I generally add at the end of cooking if I’m using a prepared stock or soup to avoid over-seasoning.
4. Stir and cover. Turn the heat down to low and cook for 25 minutes.
5. Remove the lid and stir the quinoa. When the grains are fully cooked, they will turn translucent, with the curling tail of the germ visible. If the quinoa is not translucent or the mixture still looks wet (it most likely will if you’ve added beans or vegetables to the pot), cover and cook for 10 more minutes (20 if it’s really wet). Repeat until you’re happy with the result.
6. Fluff the quinoa, salt to taste, and serve.

But now it’s meddling in a new and more creative way than morning sickness that’s not bad enough to complain about but was annoying enough to keep me from cooking anything interesting enough to write about. No, now it’s gotten sneakier.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to have dinner waiting for Chris when he got home, in an attempt to make up for all the times he made dinner this spring when I wasn’t feeling up to it. I had a cucumber and several tomatoes–beautiful tomatoes, small Camparis as red as fire engines and hovering just at the apex of perfect, sweet ripeness–so something vaguely Greek/Mediterranean seemed the way to go. I turned to a box of falafel mix in the cupboard, but suddenly plain falafel fried up from a mix seemed too boring for those tomatoes.

So I got creative. After getting a batch of potatoes bathed in olive oil, lemon juice, garlic and Greek spices in to the oven to roast, I halved the tomatoes and scooped out the watery seeds, just leaving the juicy yet still firm flesh behind. Kosher salt served both to season the insides of the tomatoes and encourage them to let down some of that juice once I turned them upside down on top of some folded paper towels. I oiled the pan and the tomatoes with more olive oil and spaced the red beauties out, cut sides up, and stuck them in with the potatoes to roast for, oh, about 15 or 20 minutes at 375-400 degrees (you see, I’ve already forgotten), until they had softened and sizzled and the kitchen was perfumed with their scent.

I used a bamboo skewer to pour the juices that had gathered in the bottom of each tomato half as it had baked. While they’d been in the oven, I’d mixed up some falafel and set it aside to absorb the water I’d added. I rolled the falafel into tiny balls, much smaller than I expected, and pressed it into each tomato. I think I also sprayed them with a bit more oil at that point, in the hope of simulating frying the falafel in a pan. Then I baked them again, this time at only 350 degrees but with the convection fan on in the hope of giving the falafel a golden, crisp top.

Chris walked in the door around that time, perfect timing for the falafel to come out and join the potatoes, a simple salad of cucumber, tomato and red onion and toasted whole wheat pita wedges I’d resurrected from the depths of our freezer. I topped each tomato with a bullseye of yogurt sauce, my quick-and-shameless substitute for tzatziki sauce that I make when I don’t have the forethought to make the real thing, that needs only plain yogurt, lemon juice, olive oil, salt, dried dill and a few minutes to sit mixed up on the counter to meld the flavors and hydrate the dill.

The tomatoes were delicious, even better than I expected. Roasting had only made them sweeter, and they balanced the salty, seasoned falafel wonderfully. Not only that but they were beautiful on the plate and fun to eat, a little bite-sized taste of savory sunshine. I even got some halfway decent photos of my plate even though I was too impatient to eat to take very many, leaving me with a quick and easy post whenever I wanted to write it up.

The problem was that they weren’t perfect. There was a little too much falafel-to-tomato, so that the middle of each was a bit mushy, a bit much in general, and the falafel mix I used seemed especially bitter to me. Whether that was from aging in our pantry or just a flavor that’s always there that the roasted tomatoes brought out, I don’t know, but I kept wishing it wasn’t there. The tomatoes should have been the best thing on the plate–they certainly had all the potential necessary for that–but the roasted potatoes won that honor instead. Of course, they were possibly the best potatoes I’d ever roasted, but the tomatoes could have topped them all the same.

I decided that I needed to make the tomatoes again, to give them a chance to shine in all their glory. I’d make falafel from scratch, despite a superb failure at it early in my cooking career that discouraged both of us not to try to make it ourselves again. I’d look into hiding a little surprise of flavor under the falafel. My first thought was feta, but the powers that be warn pregnant women away from soft and blue cheeses, so I talked to the nice people at the cheese counter at Whole Foods and struck upon mizithra cheese as a substitute, maybe with some chopped kalamata olives to really punch up the flavor. I even thought about making my own pita. We did that in pastry school, and it was actually pretty fun and easy. Maybe this time I’d roast the tomatoes low and slow in the oven overnight to dry them out better and super-concentrate the flavor, and maybe I’d try flipping them over and frying them at the end once the falafel was cooked through down to the cheese and olives. And with all of that effort, surely the tomatoes would be worthy of words at the end.

I bought all the ingredients, and even blended up my falafel, but somehow the tomatoes still haven’t graced our table again. Why? I’ve utterly lost an interest in eating them. It seems the gustatory life of the pregnant woman is far more complex than the morning sickness or pickles and ice cream jokes would lead you to believe. I have yet to actually crave anything. To me, a “craving” implies an intense, physical desire for something.

What happens to me is something quieter. I think of a food I’d like to eat, and it sounds like a really good idea. I won’t crave it, but I also never forget that good idea until I’ve carried it out. My body will wait two patient weeks to get a chocolate doughnut, and once I’ve had that doughnut, the idea will quietly leave me in piece. The good idea may lead me to coerce friends into going to a particular restaurant to get the particular pizza I thought about two days ago, but I’ll never sit there agonizing about having to have that pizza right this instant. As far as I can see, Chris gets the most benefit out of this since he has yet been called to duty in the middle of the night to go out and get me ice cream.

Apparently, my body now has this same power in reverse. The tomatoes sound like a wonderful idea to me intellectually, something I’d like to do and photograph and write about, but my body just yawns in response to the idea of them and sends me off to make scrambled eggs for a breakfast burrito.

But if anything, pregnancy is teaching me that my body is wise. It knows what it wants and what it needs, and tomatoes stuffed with falafel is not currently on its list. It doesn’t care about satisfying my ego, only satisfying itself and the little life growing inside of it. You don’t need to make those tomatoes again, it says. Didn’t you already make them? Don’t you already have pictures? Isn’t the whole point of writing about them to pass on the idea, and haven’t you already proved it was a good one?

Now, weren’t we thinking about making oatmeal for breakfast? it adds, and leads me into the kitchen to do its bidding.

And so I give you my Falafel-Stuffed Roasted Tomatoes idea, and hope you’ll take it and improve on it and tell me how it went, so that when my body lets me make them again, I’ll know how to make them better.

Okay, so maybe I haven’t had a food aversion to the food blog itself–after all, I haven’t figured out how to disseminate it in edible form yet. But I may have eaten a few too many of those delicious vegetarian marshmallows in the same week as gorging myself on that incredibly rich Cadbury Creme Brulegg, which resulted in my not really wanting to look at or think about sugar–unless, of course, it came in a fruit or chocolately sort of flavor. Which is a problem for a writer of a blog that focuses a lot of its attention on the pastry arts. Every time I looked at the front page, I’d have to run and get some nice, bland crackers or a brown rice cake. And just when I would think that I could get past it and write something for the blog, another comment would come in on one of the offending posts and it would start all over again.

But I think I’m feeling better now, and the thought of eating a s’more only slightly grosses me out. Still, to stay on the safe side, I’m going to ease back into things with a walk on the savory side of the kitchen.

A few weeks ago, the mailman brought a big box right up to my door. I was momentarily confused by the PERISHABLE sticker until I saw address label, and then I remembered the wonderful people at FoodBuzz had offered to send me some Buitoni fresh pasta to sample.

I put the box down and immediately ripped into it so I could get it straight into the fridge. On top of the contents was a nice little note from FoodBuzz.

This seemed like a lot of packaging just for one little container of pasta. But I don’t know how much space was necessary to ensure that the ravioli was kept cold, so I’ll give them all the benefit of the doubt there.

I lifted out the pasta and set it on the counter. Wild Mushroom Agnolotti…that sounded pretty good, although portobello and crimini mushrooms, beyond being two different sizes of exactly the same mushroom, are not varieties of mushrooms that scream “wild” to me. But I do like crimini mushrooms, the cheeses sounded like good choices and the pasta looked to be pretty high quality, so I was still looking forward to giving these a shot. I meant to enter the Buitoni recipe contest with them, but after the deadline passed I figured we should just have them for dinner with garlic bread and a nice, fresh salad.

The phrase “journalistic integrity” has a certain allure, doesn’t it? It makes me want to say I didn’t like the pasta, just because I got it for free. And so it is with great hesitation that I tell you that these were absolutely the best prepackaged ravioli I’ve ever had, and possibly better than anything I’ve ever had in a restaurant. I could’ve easily eaten the entire package myself, and then gone back for seconds. The filling was flavorful enough to stand up to the sauce, and the pasta had the backbone of Chris’ latest batch of fresh pasta, when he tried using semolina flour for the first time to really amazing results. There was just something so present about the flavor and the texture of the filling that lingers in my mind, something that’s missing in most ravioli in my experience.

(The only down side to these is that “rennet” is listed in the cheese ingredients, and I usually assume that animal rennet is being used unless otherwise stated. Fortunately, Chris and I have a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell, and if someone tells, turn a blind eye” policy with rennet because we love trying different kinds of cheese so much, but for any of you stricter vegetarians out there, you’ll want to read the label.)

Oh great, I want more right now just writing about it. I have to figure out where they sell it in our area…or make something similar on my own. But ravioli are one of those things that I always think take more effort than they really do and thus never set out to make, so I don’t mind splurging on the prepared ones at the store occasionally.

As long as I’m writing about my first food sample from FoodBuzz, I might as well show off the Moo Cards they got for me.

I love everything about this company. The packaging is really cute and clever, and reading their company blog shows that there are some cool and creative people behind the product.

The cards are half the size of a regular business card, which makes them great to hand out when people seem interested in your blog. I like that they’re a little less formal, but at the same time they’re nice and thick and vivid and glossy, so they have a professional look to them as well.

The cool thing about them is that you can have a different photo on the back of every card. FoodBuzz chose a bunch of bright and colorful food photos, and they’re really eye-catching.

I’m working on a set of images now to get some cards to hand out at writing conferences, but I’ll probably also end up ordering another set for this here blog, because as cool as these FoodBuzz ones are, I’d like to have my own photography on the back of mine. I always feel like I have to explain that the photos aren’t my own!

Long story short? FoodBuzz knows how to treat their Featured Publishers right! I was already enjoying being part of the program before the free stuff showed up, but free stuff never hurts. Thanks!

This is not a question I would have pondered without a concrete basis in real life, but I got to find out the answer anyway. A few weeks ago, Chris came home from work and presented me with two paper bags from the Pappardelle’s Pasta stall at Pike Place market. One contained lemon parsley mafaldine, which were wide, frilly noodles with flecks of bright green. Okay, sounds good, right? But the second bag I wasn’t so sure about. A fanciful fruit pasta blend sounded like just another weird food Chris was trying simply because it was a weird food.

He also brought home a recipe for a fruit salad using the noodles from the stall with him, and he was very keen to try both the pasta and the recipe. Every night he mentioned wanting to make it, so finally I rounded up all the ingredients for him one day and had them waiting when he got home.

The noodles were…surprising. I was shocked that I didn’t hate them. That’s not to say that they weren’t weird, but as far as fruit-flavored pasta goes, I’d imagine this wouldn’t rank half-badly. I was impressed that the colors stayed so vibrant after being cooked, proudly declaring whether they were lemon, lime, tangerine or raspberry flavored. The texture was good and robust, and I was charmed by the shape, which I thought looked like two separate noodles twisting into a close embrace. I kept coming back to try them again and again while Chris chopped up the fruit for the salad.

My expectations rose. Really, they weren’t half bad. I could see them working in a light fruit salad, and they certainly were striking. Chris added the celery (the recipe calls for way too little celery) and the fruit–apple, mandarin orange slices, and halved red and green grapes–and tossed it with the pasta, and it really looked quite pretty. Maybe I was actually going to like this stuff.

Unfortunately, it didn’t look quite so appetizing once the yogurt-based dressing showed up at the party. But it would still taste good…maybe?

Not so much. The flavor of the noodles seemed quite strident when we were eating them on their own, but it was completely masked by the fruit and the dressing. To make matters worse, the mandarin orange slices and the orange juice concentrate mixed in with the yogurt made the whole thing taste candy-sweet, artificial and harshly acidic. Chris and I both got through our portions for dinner that night, trying not to waste food, but the one and only bite I took from the bowl I served myself the next day brought the word “inedible” to mind. The best we could figure is that the company was trying to appeal to the church picnic crowd, not foodies, and came up with a recipe that would echo the fruit salads of yore.

We still had the lemon parsley noodles to try. I had much higher hopes for them. Chris blanched some gorgeous asparagus and made a sweet onion sauce to go on top. This time I was even more disappointed. The dish certainly wasn’t inedible–the asparagus and the sauce were both spot-on, so that helped–but there was something off about the lemon flavor in the pasta. Chris finally put a name to it when he pointed out that they were using lemon oil to flavor the pasta, which made it taste like lemon oil rather than fresh lemon, and that tone of lemon flavor actually worked much better with the fruit-flavored pasta.

In the end, I wouldn’t buy the lemon parsley stuff again, but I might give the fruit-flavored pasta another chance. Only this time with my own recipe. Fresh orange slices rather than canned mandarins would help, as would a much less overpowering dressing. The walnuts and light, crisp apples could make a repeat appearance, and I think we decided that the right goat cheese would counter the fruit flavors nicely. However, if I find myself wanting bright, flashy pasta, I think I’ll try out this wicked pasta dish Greg posted at Sippity Sup yesterday, where the beets in the dish turn the fusilli bright neon red.

Okay, I haven’t perfected my oatmeal cupcake yet. When I do it will be legendary, but I may have to turn to the world of molecular gastronomy if I want this baby to keep its shape after a spin in the microwave.

What I have perfected, though, is the weekday morning breakfast.

It’s no secret to anyone that weekday morning breakfasts have gone very literal: all the do is break our nighttime fast and keep us going until we have our first real meal at lunchtime, or dinner if lunch is a grab-and-go affair. I “work” from home (I’ll remove the quotes after I get a publishing contract), I have a love and appreciation for breakfast born of watching so many people be nourished by our two-course offerings at the Inn, and even I have a hard time sitting down to something substantial most mornings. Sure, sometimes I’ll make myself an omelet and realize how little time it takes, but any reform is usually short lived. Within a week, I’m reaching for the cereal box again or just waiting for lunchtime.

The cure for this is my steel-cut oatmeal. Not only does it take very little hands-on time on my part, especially if I have the dry ingredients mixed and at the ready in advance, but it makes fantastic leftovers.

	Of course, this photo might have you asking the inevitable question: how? This is what the oatmeal looks like after sitting in the pan while Chris and I ate as much as we could. Actually, it looks worse than this, because I stirred it up before I took the photo. Not only does it turn thick and gummy as it cools, but it forms a dry crust on top from evaporation. For this reason, it never even occurred to me to keep the leftover oatmeal. We’d make a single batch and stuff ourselves eating the whole thing. But then Trader Joe’s started selling frozen, precooked oatmeal. I bought it, tried it, and it was pretty good, though not as good as mine. Then it hit me: I could do that!
	All you need is a silicone muffin pan. I just fill mine up, mounding each one little over the top if I can to make it a good serving size, and pop it in the freezer as-is. You can put it on a sheet pan for stability, but the flexible muffin pan with its grippy bottom actually does a good job of conforming to the shape of the food it’s set on. Once the “cupcakes” are frozen solid, you could pop them out and store them in a freezer bag, but I usually eat mine within the week I make it so I don’t even bother. I just leave them in the muffin pan and pop one out whenever i want it.
	When you’re ready for breakfast, put a frozen block of oatmeal in a bowl. I used to follow the directions that Trader Joe’s provides on their packaging–heat for two minutes, smash up with a spoon, and heat for one to two minutes more–but when I was trying to make oatmeal cupcakes (I wasn’t joking about that), I learned that it’s easier just to cook them for four minutes on high, plus or minus 30 seconds depending on the power of your microwave. While the oatmeal does its thing in the microwave, I take those four minutes to get my fruit in order: slice up a mango, supreme an orange, chop an apple…whatever I have on hand.
	This is what the oatmeal looks like when it comes out of the microwave. See why my cupcake experiment didn’t work? I know it doesn’t look so great right here, but stir it up…
	…and it looks just as good as the day you made it. The dryness completely disappears, so you don’t have to worry about any rubbery bits mixed into the oatmeal like you might think there would be.
	So, not bad for a weekday morning breakfast, right? You have whole grains, fruit, dairy for protein, lots of vitamins and minerals, and a great-tasting, easy-to-eat meal that will fill you up and keep you going without feeling like a load of bricks in your stomach. I’ve been known to turn to is as an evening comfort food snack in front of the TV as well. When I’m sick, it makes me feel warm and cozy, like someone has been slaving away over a pot of oatmeal just for me.

My favorite of that second sort of task was the opportunity to come up with new dishes, which leads us to today’s recipe. (You’ll notice that it’s still on their list of sample breakfasts, although I have to say that I never put papaya on it, mostly because I have yet to meet a papaya I’ve got on with well.) This oatmeal was my star contribution to the breakfast lineup, the only one that really stuck, the only one that it was imperative to leave the recipe behind when I had to leave long before I ever wanted to.

At the Inn, there were several discussions about what to call the oatmeal. I have to admit, it was a hard sell every morning I made it. When you say “oatmeal”, most people think of the instant kind that you hide under lots of milk, brown sugar and raisins (if you fall on the pro-raisin side of things). Even qualifying it with “steel-cut” didn’t do much good. This was a few years ago, and steel-cut oatmeal wasn’t on the average American’s radar yet. It needed a good name to recommend it to the uninitiated.

I liked to call it “Pirate Oatmeal”, both because of the fruit and because I sometimes added rum at the end of the cooking time. (Pirates of the Caribbean was big back then, and it seemed like the thing to do.) No one else seemed to like the name, so I kept thinking. The names I came up with weren’t any better. I think I even tried “Oat Risotto” out on the owner at one point as a way to hint at the cooking process and upscale nature of the oatmeal. Thankfully, he shot that one down, too.

I still call it Pirate Oatmeal when the need for a name arises. However, it’s never fit all that well, so I’ve decided to dub it “The Tiger’s Oatmeal” in honor of the launch of this site. I think that both captures the exotic twist of the spices and fruit and the way this oatmeal invigorates you for the day ahead.

Components

Cardamom Yogurt
Spiced Ginger Steel-Cut Oatmeal
Fruit, preferably tropical (mango-pineapple-strawberry is my favorite combo), sliced and diced as you see fit
Toasted coconut flakes

Acknowledgments

The Cardamom Yogurt was derived from a recipe for Mango with Yogurt in Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant, and my oatmeal evolved from Alton Brown’s delicious Steel Cut Oatmeal, but both diverged from the original recipes long ago.

Method

One of the great things about cooking the same thing for a crowd week after week is that you learn how to make it in your sleep and you figure out all sorts of tricks for increasing efficiency and serving things to a large group over an extended period of time. One of the great things about writing for a food blog is that you get to share those tricks with other people. Here’s what I’ve learned about making steel-cut oatmeal over the years.

	The yogurt’s quick and easy: whisk it with the maple syrup and cardamom until smooth. Both the syrup and cardamom should be done to taste, so make sure you start with a conservative amount of both and work up from there. For instance, I like a lot of spice in anything spiced, so I use eight times as much cardamom as the original recipe. I think it tastes better that way, but a few people out there would disagree, I’m sure.
	The yogurt is best made the night before you want to use it. This gives the cardamom time to disperse its flavor throughout the yogurt. If you’re making it the morning of, though, you can add more cardamom so that it will have more flavor right away. I usually make an entire large container of yogurt at a time and put it back into the fridge, making sure to clearly label that it’s cardamom yogurt, not plain. It’s great to put on top of all sorts of fruit, with or without oatmeal, and I find if I have it in the fridge, it always gets used. It helps, of course, that yogurt has an excellent shelf life.
	Here is another part of the recipe that can be done the night ahead. I usually put the oatmeal in a sealable container and shake it up with the spices (and any dried fruit). It can be used right away, left on the counter overnight, or put away in the cupboard until you want to use it. Even if you’re going to make it right away, the advantage is that the spices are evenly distributed throughout the oatmeal from the start. Here I’ve added a lot of cinnamon with smaller amounts of ginger, cardamom, and pumpkin pie spice (I was too lazy to grind cloves). Like I said, I like spiced things to taste like they have spices in them. In these photos I’m making a double batch of the oatmeal (I always do, for reasons that will become clear later), and I think this is about as much as I would’ve liked to have used on a single batch.
	This is what it looks like all shaken up. When I’m eyeballing the spices, I usually go until it’s quite a bit browner than this, but unless you’re like me on the spice thing, this is a good ratio to start with.
	Everything up until this point can be done beforehand. (If you’re using the coconut flakes, you can also toast them ahead of time for about 2 minutes in a 350 degree oven, making sure only the very edges turn toasty and brown.) When the time comes to make the oatmeal, make sure the first thing you do is to get the water boiling. This saves you time, and worry over burning the oatmeal while you fiddle with your tea or electric kettle. Ginger is the key to this entire recipe. I don’t remember when I first tried it in the oatmeal or why, only that it imparts a flavor to it that I now can’t separate from the taste of steel cut oatmeal. When I get steel cut oatmeal elsewhere, it’s never quite the same, and the crystallized ginger is the key.
	I have a pinched nerve that causes a lot of pain in my shoulder, which is why I don’t cook professionally anymore. Chopping and slicing hurt it more than just about anything else, especially tough things like crystallized ginger. Only recently did I think of the answer: I put the ginger in a bowl and pour just enough of the boiling water for the oatmeal to cover. After two minutes, the ginger is soft and much easier to dice. (Be careful. It’s also very hot.) Because I count on all of the flavor from the ginger, plus the hint of sweetness from the sugar encrusted on it, I reserve the water it soaked in and use it as part of the water for the oatmeal. Problem solved.
	Now it’s time to cook the oatmeal. First, melt the butter in your pot over medium heat. (You can get away with using less (or more!) butter, depending on whether you’re going for health or luxury.) While it melts, make sure your water is boiling.
	Add the spiced oatmeal. Stir well to evenly coat with butter.
	Toast the oatmeal for about two minutes, stirring the whole time to keep it from burning.
	Add the boiling water. It will bubble dramatically as soon as it hits the bottom of the pot, so beware of flying flecks of hot, wet oatmeal! I got hit by one right at the moment this photo was taken.
	Add the crystallized ginger and stir together, just until everything is mixed, then stop and turn the heat down to low. Because the oatmeal is hot and the water is boiling before they meet, you won’t have to wait for them to come to a boil. Leave it to simmer, uncovered. Set a timer for 25 minutes and don’t touch the oatmeal until it goes off. While the oatmeal cooks, you’ll have time to cut up fruit and toast coconut flakes, if you haven’t already. If you have, then make yourself a cup of tea with any excess boiling water and relax.
	After 25 minutes, add the buttermilk. Once again, stir only long enough to combine. Set the timer again, this time for 10 minutes, and leave it to simmer again, uncovered. If you are making a large batch of oatmeal for a lot of people, and won’t be serving it all at once, you have another option. After the timer goes off, rather than adding the buttermilk, just cover the pot and turn off the heat. Then, make the oatmeal to order by scooping it into a second, smaller pan, adding a little of the buttermilk and cooking it until it starts to bubble.
	After the ten minutes have passed, turn off the heat. Give it one last stir–this would be the best time to add that rum, if you’re feeling pirate-y.
	Serve the oatmeal, topped with the yogurt, fruit and coconut.
	One way to convince picky eaters (children or adults) to try the oatmeal is to cover it all up with the yogurt and a ton of fruit. (If they hate yogurt and fruit as well, I can’t help you.) You know, I’ve been following too many bento blogs lately…sadly, though, I still couldn’t figure out how to give my tiger stripes with the fruit I had on hand.
	I mentioned above that I always make a double batch of oatmeal, even if I’m eating alone. The reason is that this oatmeal makes fantastic leftovers, something I only figured out a few years ago. This is already getting awfully long, so next time I’ll demonstrate how to do that.

I hope you will try out this oatmeal. I still have the same problem I did at the Inn: there really is no way to make it sound as good as it tastes, even if I use every superlative in my arsenal. I never can pick a favorite book or TV show or scene I’ve written for one of my novels–it’s that whole choosing between your babies thing–but this is my number one, super-favorite recipe I’ve ever come up with. I can’t help wanting everyone to taste it.

So, what about you? Do you have a personal recipe that you’re more proud of than any other, one that’s special no matter how many times you make it?

To experience this oatmeal in its full glory (and to see more detailed, illustrated instructions and extra tips and tricks), check out The Tiger’s Oatmeal, which is served with cardamom yogurt, toasted coconut flakes and tropical fruit.

Ingredients

1 cup steel-cut oats
1/2 tablespoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon powdered ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
3 oz crystallized ginger, finely chopped
3 cups water
1 tablespoon butter
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
2 tablespoons rum (very optional)

Directions

1. Put the oats, spices and crystallized ginger in a container with a tight lid. Seal and shake until evenly combined.
2. Bring the water to a boil.
3. Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Once it starts to bubble, add the oats and stir to coat evenly with the butter. Continue to stir until the oats are nice and toasted and you can smell the spices, about two minutes.
4. Pour in the boiling water. Stir the oats well, then lower the heat and leave to gently simmer for 25 minutes, undisturbed.
5. Add the buttermilk and stir to combine. Let the oats simmer for another 10 minutes. At this point, you can stir them occasionally if you want, but they’ll be fine unattended.
6. Stir once more. (This is the time to add the rum and the salt.) Serve and enjoy.

Notes

• You can easily customize this recipe to fit anything you have in your cupboard. Try adding different spices or dried fruits (I personally recommend keeping the ginger in any variation). I’ve even made a vegan version on the fly by nixing the butter (you could use canola oil instead) and replacing the buttermilk with orange juice and maple syrup.
• This recipe makes a great breakfast to serve to a large crowd, because you can double or triple it without increasing the cooking time. I’ve found that like rice, the ratio of water-to-oats decreases as you increase the amount of oats, so use 5 cups of water for a double batch and 7 for a triple.
• I always make a double batch, even if I’m only cooking for myself, because this oatmeal freezes very well. Simply freeze any leftovers in a large silicone muffin pan. To reheat, place an oatmeal “muffin” in a bowl and microwave for 3-4 minutes. Once you give it a good stir, you have a healthy, hearty weekend breakfast on a weekday morning, especially if you take those minutes and use them to chop up some fruit to go on top!
• If you want to hold a large batch of oatmeal over an extended period of time (up to three hours in my experience at the Inn), you can cook the oatmeal up through Step 5. Then, rather than adding the buttermilk and continuing their simmer, stir once, cover the pan, and turn off the heat. Then, as people filter in for breakfast, combine as much oatmeal as you need with a portion of the buttermilk in a smaller pan and stir over medium heat until the oatmeal bubbles. The other advantage to this method is that you can accommodate individual salt restrictions this way, leaving it out for those who can’t have it.

Joe never actually uses a recipe when he makes this, so I took some time tonight to measure things out while I made my own version.

4 oz garlic, minced (2-3 heads)
1/2 cup olive oil
one 7oz can chipotle peppers (usually packaged in in adobo sauce)
pinch of salt

Mince the garlic and simmer it with the oil and a pinch of salt, stirring often, until the garlic starts to take on a golden hue (5-10 minutes). Roughly dice the chipotle peppers, and add them and their sauce into the garlic and oil mixture. Turn off the heat and blend until the sauce has a consistent texture and a nice deep red color. I usually use an immersion blender for this, but a standard blender or food processor would work just as well.

Don’t worry if the sauce separates a little, as it is easy to re-integrate by stirring.

Serve as-is, or mix at least 1:1 with sour cream for a smooth and refreshing sauce that still has a lot of kick. We usually use this as topping for enchiladas or other Mexican food, but the version without sour cream also makes a really good addition as seasoning in soups and other sauces.

Someone should tell all of that to the seven inches that’s set up camp in my yard, and the ice packed onto every roadway. It’s overstayed its welcome.

Oh, it was a fun guest on Thursday when it all fell in a matter of hours. The whole day took on the feel of a real snow day, complete with powdery snowman snow, another rarity in our region. Our snowballs usually crumble or pack down to nothing but lethal ice. Baker Bee was off work and baking Portuguese sweet bread from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice (which makes the best toast and French toast I’ve ever had, especially when topped with my dad’s apple butter–we went through a whole jar on two loaves), and a couple of snowed-in friends stopped off in the middle of a walk for rest and a warm drink. I continued reaquainting myself with tools and supplies from pastry school and cake decorating. Opening the tubs that had been gathering dust in the spare bedroom for far too long now was enough like tearing into Christmas presents to infuse the day with a festive spirit. It was the first snow day I’ve had as an adult that really felt like a snow day.

Yesterday, however, without fresh flakes to revive it, the snow started to take on the appearance of a houseguest who’d lost all of their luggage down to their tolietry kit but insisted they could “get by” until the airline came through and delivered their stuff. It looked cold and tired, and the prospect of the winter storm that’s supposed to hit on Sunday made it not seem like quite the miracle it had been the day before. The fun was gone for the most part, but Baker Bee did bake another loaf of bread–a Italian-ish white loaf with some of the new sour we’re cultivating in the fridge. It didn’t turn out very sour–I didn’t really expect it to have much sour to it yet–but it did have a lot of flavor, so Mr. Bee suggested we should make pasta to go with it.

I decided I didn’t want anything heavy, like the cheese sauce Baker Bee wanted to make. Olive oil and roasted veggies seemed like the best way to go. I thought about the vegetables we had in the fridge–vegetables that needed attention as soon as possible, since the vegetable barely stew he’d made on Monday had been too good to think of cooking anything else before it was all gone. Crimini mushrooms, mixed bell peppers, broccoli florets, Campari tomatoes. Not my usual combination for pasta, but okay. And then I got out a big casserole dish and started slicing vegetables.

In the pan, I tossed the mushrooms, orange and red bell peppers, and broccoli with olive oil, coarsely-chopped garlic, salt, black pepper, and a mixture of dried oregano, basil, thyme and marjoram, then put it in to roast at 375° for about 45 or 50 minutes total. I stirred the veggies every five to seven minutes, a bit more often than I probably should have but I kept smelling something charring in the oven, like a barbeque, which might have been the mushrooms sticking out on top or (more likely) some of the cornmeal that has escaped off of Baker Bee’s pizza stone during the bread-baking spree.

When I opened the door each time, though, a wonderful aroma bathed my face along with the steam, carrying with it the smell of the roasted vegetables reminded me most of the ones I get on my sandwiches at a place called Grinders up north when I go to watch True Blood with a writing friend. (If you live in the area and end up north of Shoreline on Aurora sometime, make sure to stop there for lunch. So, so messy and so, so good. Plus the amibiance inside is a lot cooler than you might guess from the location and the outside of the building.)

The tomatoes went in separately, quartered and lying on their backs, with more olive oil and a good dusting of (vegetarian) bacon salt and regular sea salt. I think they shared the oven with the other vegetables for about the last 15 minutes. When they started looking happy and roasted, I shut off the oven, opened the door a bit and left all the vegetables in there to keep warm while Baker Bee made the whole wheat spaghetti and tossed it with a jar of organic heirloom pasta sauce we got to try. (It was very good, by the way…tasty but thin enough not to compete with the veggies.) Once all was ready, we layered the veggies over the pasta and sprinkled it all with parmesan cheese.

I was expecting a lot less from this pasta than it delivered, possibly because I don’t normally roast the vegetables that I put in with pasta–it’s far too easy to boil some broccoli in the same water as the pasta and call it slightly healthy. But the texture of the vegetables and the pasta were just right. The “tooth-feel” of the mushrooms in particular was exactly what I was looking for, which was a roasted equivalent of the perfectly cooked mushrooms in Baker Bee’s vegetable barely stuff earlier in the week. The flavors were the sort that get better as you eat. I thought I was getting full and set my plate aside, but soon I was craving the pasta again and took it back in hand. All in all, a warm, flavorful dish that took me immediately back to my cozy snow day feeling from the day before.

I made a few mistakes along the way. Mistakes like forgetting the egg in the citrus pate sucree (I put it to the left of the food processor and the rest of my mise en place to the right) and experimenting with a store-bought carton of egg whites for the meringue when I didn’t have time to make a second batch. However, even without that egg, the pate sucree was possibly the best tart crust I’ve ever made, and several people complimented it. It uses both lemon and orange zest, a flavor combination that I used in my wedding cake years ago that really seemed to punch up the flavor.

But there was no blessing in disguise in regards to the meringue, unless I count the reminder that things never go well when I try to cut corners. At least this time it was in the spirit of experimentation and not just out of laziness, as usual. I used the Trader Joe’s 100% egg whites, and I knew that they weren’t going to be ideal when I saw how cloudy they were, but I went ahead and made the meringue. The foam ended up looking, well, very insipid and watery, not the airy dollop of heaven that I wanted to recreate from the magazine. By the time I was done, there was no time left, so the mediocre meringue went on the tart and I did my best to torch it, even though it didn’t want to brown properly.

Despite all of that, I don’t think I’ve ever had a dessert disappear so quickly at a big family event or gotten quite so many compliments and questions. I kept being surprised that people liked it, because I wasn’t entirely pleased with the mouth feel of the cranberry filling, as pretty as it was. It had that gross texture that comes from too much cornstarch, so next time I make this I’ll either decrease the cornstarch or experiment with some of the alternate thickners my husband has been playing with in his attempts at molecular gastronomy, now that we have a kitchen that we can actually cook in again. The xanthan gum marshmallows he made last week were a huge success, so I’m reading up on hydrocolloides now, too.

As I said above, I picked out a number of new holiday recipes to try this year. When I ate meat, Thanksgiving was one of my favorite holidays, and I’ve been trying to recreate that experience in a vegetarian way for eight years now, with varying amounts of success. This year, though, inspired by the new kitchen, I decided to try to find some new flavors to turn into new traditions, rather than continue to try to recreate the omnivore’s version of the holiday. Pretty much all of them (other than a new twist on the savory seitan and mushroom dish I’ve come up with to stand in for turkey) came from Martha Stewart–I rarely turn to her during the rest of the year, but the recipes in the holiday issues of the magazine are always really appealing to me, so much so that I keep them in their own binder on my cookbook shelf.

Cauliflower Gratin with Endive was delicious–cheesy without being greasy at all, and the Israeli couscous scattered in the bottom of the pan absorbed the sauce but held its shape in a texturally interesting way.

Stuffing was always my favorite part of Thanksgiving, so it took a lot strength to turn my back on the plain old crouton, celery and sage type stuff we always had. The Cornbread, Wild Mushroom and Pecan Stuffing I settled on was so good I just wanted to hold it on my tongue and not swallow it, or even chew it.

We used maitake, hedgehog and oyster mushrooms–I’d never cooked with hedgehog mushrooms, and they were extremely tasty!–so it wasn’t inexpensive. Otherwise, I would’ve made another pan straight away and wolfed it down at home. I have plans to try it with less expensive mushrooms soon. The pecans were a revelation. I’ve often put walnuts into savory cooking, but I think this was my first time using pecans that way, and they complemented the mushrooms very well.

It seems like we made another new dish, but I can’t think of what it was, other than the seitan stuff, where the newness of it lay mostly in my husband’s interpretation of how to cook it based on my instructions I yelled from the shower. That and he tried a trick for quickly browning onions by adding baking soda to them that he read about somewhere online. It worked. But it also made the onions completely dissolve…which had the effect of coating the seitan in the onion pulp and frying it onto it. Not what we were going for, but I think I’ll do it again next time we make it.