Someone mentioned firsts

[redbird]

When adrian_turtle offered me oatmeal for breakfast, I admitted to having never tried it, but being curious. Offered a choice of steel-cut or rolled oats, I had no preference, so we tossed a coin. Steel-cut (a.k.a. pinhead) oatmeal for breakfast Saturday morning, with maple syrup and dried cherries. I liked it.

Sunday morning, we had the rolled oats, for comparison purposes, with maple syrup and raisins. I concluded that I prefer the steel-cut, so this morning we had steel-cut oats with maple syrup and dried blueberries. Had I stayed much longer, Adrian would have run out of maple syrup.

It'll be back to yogurt tomorrow morning--part of the point of the yogurt-every-morning approach is that it's minimal work--but I expect to be buying some oats, and maybe some dried blueberries.

Comments

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

"Porridge" is a more general term, here. It's sort of a technical cooking term, and hardly anyone uses it here in conversation, but most people recognize it as the general category including oatmeal, cream-of-wheat, cornmeal mush, and other kinds of hot cereal. (Cornmeal mush is a kind of porridge, traditional in the southern US. Polenta is sophisticated foreign food. *grin* It's all a difference of attitude and seasonings.)

The steel-cut oats are just milled oats, they look kind of like pearled barley. Rolled oats have the grains steamed open and then rolled flat, so they cook faster and have a different texture. (Rolled oats are what goes in oatmeal cookies, generally.) Quick oats are rolled oats that have been cut into smaller pieces, for even faster cooking. And baby cereal or instant oatmeal takes rolled oats and grinds them to dust. I don't know how much this kind of pre-processing speeds up the digestive process and makes grains worse for diabetics. I've heard conflicting reports, and there will probably be more research done in the next 10 years or so.