Crock Pot Oatmeal Goodness!

Yesterday, the 18th Annual Golden Spurtle World Porridge Making Championship was held in the highlands of Scotland. Sadly, I couldn't be there, but I'm having some porridge for breakfast today :)

Who doesn't love waking up to a hot breakfast on a cold morning? It's a rare thing when you're the parent though!  Unless you put breakfast in the crock pot before you went to bed, that is...

Crock Pot Steel Cut Oatmeal

I love steel cut oats but don't have time to stand at the stove for 20 minutes in the morning. By using my crock pot to slow cook them all night, I don't have to!

I use Bob's Red Mill Steel Cut Oats. 

Bob's was the 2009 Winner of the Golden Spurtle! 

Here is Bob's recipe for the traditional way of preparing steel cut oats. Very simple. Oats, water, pinch of salt. I add an extra half cup of water for overnight simmering. 3½ cups water to 1 cup of oats is perfect for the consistency I like. You may need more or less depending on your slow cooker, and how thick or creamy you like your oatmeal. 

Instead of mixing the ingredients in a pot over the stove as the directions say, I use my crock pot as a double boiler. Here you see a glass bowl that fits inside my crock pot. Beneath the bowl I have placed wads of aluminum foil. They keep the bowl from sitting directly on the crock, so water is between the crock and the bowl, for even cooking and to prevent the crock from cracking. I don't add the water until after the bowl is in the crock, or the foil will float! 

So, my bowl is on the foil in the crock - next I add 1 cup of oats. If you've never had steel cut oats you'll notice they look nothing like rolled oats, the kind used for instant and old-fashioned oatmeal.

Next I stir the water and a pinch of salt into the oats, then slowly and carefully pour water in between the crock and the bowl of oats, until the water in the bowl and the water in the crock are level.

Lastly, I put the lid on, turn my crock pot on low, and go to bed! 

That's it - easy peasy!

In the morning, after about 8 hours of simmering, the pot of steaming, hearty, creamy, chewy, nutty oatmeal is ready for me to spoon into my bowl and add my favorite toppings to! I like a drizzle of Canadian maple syrup and a sprinkling of cinnamon. You can add things to flavour the oatmeal before it cooks or after. Nuts and raisins get sweet and tender with cooking overnight.

I love my crock pot. It's as old as my marriage, and still going strong ♥

Beets to Bento

    

Last night I was browsing the articles about preserving at Homegrown & Healthy and when I reached a post about beets, I realized something - I have never eaten a beet! Have no idea at all what they taste like. And they are such a pretty colour too! I like radishes, rutabaga, turnip, parsnips, & carrots - they are all root vegetables ... would I like beets? I wonder... Anyways,  I've been thinking about ways to add colour to the sproutlets lunches without using artificial food colourings, so that vibrant purple got me thinking... could I use beets? Would they be good to colour things pink or purple, such as pancakes or muffins, or would that taste awful? I searched baking with beets. This title near the top of the search results caught my eye:  Just Hungry | Baked Beets. I hadn't been planning on baking beets just yet, thought I'd ease the kiddos into it by first using the beets to colour something familiar, so if they liked it I could eventually use it as an example to entice them to try the veggie itself - but I clicked the link anyways, out of curiosity. And at the top of the page, under the heading My Bento Book, was a photo link to The Just Bento Cookbook, a book by the same author as the blog I had landed on, who also happened to write Just Bento, a blog I had on my own blogroll. Ha! I had to laugh, because here I was not even looking for bentos, and I find a book about bentos.  It's all about bentos with me lately :)

I got distracted and never did find out how beets would do in baked goods... 

Sea, how cute!

This is one of my favourite bentos so far - but also one of my most time consuming - I think it must have taken me half an hour! Mostly because I didn't plan it in advance - so much time was spent staring at the food I had on hand trying to envision how to use it to create what I had in mind.  Also I did make 2 of everything, but the other Sassy bowl is pink, so I didn't take a photo :)

I knew I wanted to do a sea life theme - I'd seen the adorable wiener crabs in this tutorial from Cute Food For Kids and just HAD to try them. They were so simple too! The faces did take some time to cut out and stick on with pancake syrup and tweezers, but they weren't difficult.

I had some rice stars pre-made (when we have rice left over I use my egg molds to make up a bunch of shapes for the rest of the week) so it was a snap to add a cheese smile to make a starfish. I tried to make the cantaloupe into coral by slicing it and randomly cutting chunks from the slices with half of a flower shaped cutter, then arranging the pieces to look like a tangle of coral reef... hmm... ok. The cucumber seaweed was a last minute trial & error addition - the ones you see here are the 3rd and 4th attempts - the first 2 just didn't work out, so I ate them :) And of course, got to have goldfish crackers in a sea life bento, the girls love goldfish.

It was NOT a bento for a busy morning, but today I had time, and Birdie, Sprout and I all loved how it turned out ♥ 

I made a big mess on the counter too, lots of little scraps, but luckily they were yummy all mixed together for my lunch. Scrap salad, I have that a lot  :)




I won Bento of the Week : Smiles! Thanks to all who voted!

Oh, I almost forgot! Here are Pickle's peanut butter sandwiches!

And I'll let you in on a a bread-saving secret... the sandwich bottoms don't have to look pretty! When using cookie cutters instead of Lunch Punches, I often cut the bottom shapes from the larger scraps, and piece them together. The peanut butter holds them in place and Pickle never even looks underneath :)

Smile - Lunch :)

This is not my photograph. But it made me smile, so I wanted to share it in case it might make someone else smile too.

Bella had a field trip today, an outdoor one, and it's not a nice day at all, it's windy, wet and gray - my poor girl. She was excited to be wearing my fleece lined rain poncho though :) And I hope her lunch makes her smile - it should, she specifically requested everything in it!

A peanut butter sandwich with her name and a heart, the last of the sushi treat rolls, a homemade pumpkin oatmeal muffin, and cucumbers & carrots. She hoped her teacher would be pleased that her lunch was completely litter free - from the Easy Lunchbox she always takes, to the cloth napkin that was a gift with purchase from One Small Step - since they would be eating at the park. Pack it in, pack it out, that's the rule :)

The Great Apple Browning Experiment

At last! I finally got around to doing an apple browning prevention experiment!  In order to see what works best to prevent the oxidization browning of sliced apples, I treated 6 Granny Smith apple slices each with a different thing suggested to prevent browning - plain water, apple juice, orange juice, lemon juice (in water), ginger ale, and Fruit Fresh, and left 1 alone. I labeled them and left them exposed to the air, photographing them throughout an 8 hour period. Here are the results:

Freshly cut. 

The apple I did nothing to has already started to brown. The one dipped in orange juice hasn't started browning, it just looks a bit like it because it has a slight tinge from the juice itself.

1 hour exposed to the air. 

The apple I did nothing to is quite browned, the one dipped in water slightly less. The apples dipped in juices have about the same degree of browning. Surprisingly, the apple dipped in ginger ale has browned as much as if not more than the one dipped in water! The Fruit Fresh apple has not changed.

4 hours exposure. 
This is probably what an apple I sliced in the morning would look like by lunch time for my kids. The apple I did nothing to has browned considerably - no surprise there. The apple dipped in ginger ale is a close second though! My kids wouldn't want to eat either of those. The apple dipped in water has browned less than the ginger ale one, but more than those dipped in juices. The juice apples are very similar - the lemon juice apple does seem to have browned a little bit less than the apple juice and orange juice ones - all 3 would probably still appeal to my sproutlets. The Fruit Fresh apple is almost unchanged :)

8 hrs after being sliced. The Fruit Fresh apple is the clear winner - it's still very fresh-looking 8 hours later, as advertised. The orange juice apple comes in second place, it browned visibly less than the lemon and apple juice ones. The apples dipped in water and ginger ale did not fare very well, by now they are nearly as browned as the apple that had nothing done to it.

Here are the apples in order of browning, most to least. Fruit Fresh wins!

In conclusion, I'd say that the best way to keep apples from browning is to use a product made to keep produce fresh. My jar of Fruit Fresh was pretty inexpensive (about $3),  can be stored in the cupboard, and leaves no taste on the fruit. If I didn't have that, a juice containing citric acid would be my next choice. Soda pop containing citric acid (like ginger ale or Sprite) would not be my choice - dipping the apple slices in plain water worked better, without adding any sugar, and is more practical for me since we don't regularly have soda pop in our fridge - but  even if we did I wouldn't want to open a whole bottle/can just to brush a little on my kids' fruit ;)

* I should also add that these apple were dipped, not soaked, in the product used. I have soaked apples in just plain water for 10 minutes or more and then sealed them in an airtight container and had them look perfectly fresh hours later. Preventing any air exposure - by soaking then sealing the apples in an airtight container -  is the best way - I don't always have time to soak though - sometimes I want to slice, pack, and go - and sometimes I am multi-tasking while making lunch and the apple slices may be exposed to air for a bit - and not all my containers keep all the air out either. That's why I tested these in open air.