Dr. Sam shops at Costco and, on his most recent trip, he came home with a 10 lb box of oatmeal. I don't think I could have accurately pictured 10 lb of oatmeal before seeing the two huge 5 lb bags inside the box and trying to find a container to fit any amount of just one of the bags in. Its a lot of oatmeal. Now, I like oatmeal and have been eating more of it recently but getting through 10 lb anytime in the next year is going to require some creative cooking. I like making oatmeal bread and lovelovelove oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, but those usually require additional ingredients I don't always have on hand. I am going through a flour dry spell right now, because I refuse to buy it and no one else has bought it either, so I've been using up the last of all my specialty flours and mixes and getting rather creative finding flour alternatives (with varying success).
What I do have on hand that could potentially make this 10 lb of oatmeal a lot more useful is a flour mill. So my plan is to mill some of the oatmeal into oat flour. I don't know how versatile oat flour is but with an excess of 10 lb, I've got some room to experiment. Bob's Red Mill sells whole grain oat flour, and I found two recipes on their website which use oat flour that I'd like to try:
Oatmeal Old-Fashion Muffins and
Poppy Seed Raisin Oatcakes.
I also think oat flour might be good in my hippy muffins. The muffins I now make and call hippy muffins originated from a recipe for
Breakfast Muffins. I've made them many times since I first found the recipe with many more- and less- successful modifications. Different flours, different chunkies, different dairy products. My favorite is using creme fraiche instead of yogurt. I always have a hard time with the topping, and it rarely turns out as good as the rest of the muffin and sometimes omit it all together. I call them hippy muffins because I usually add things that are part of an alternative, so-called healthy, hippy, whatever diet. Things like flaxseed, agave nectar, chia seeds, whole wheat whatever flour, gluten free flours. I usually add these ingredients, because my father wanted to try them and so did and then never finished then so I inherited the remainder of the various ingredients and have to use them up,
not particularly because of my hippy diet tendencies.
Its also almost
cold cereal time, a breakfast treat Pretty Boy and I both love and which is primarily oatmeal and will be perfect for weekend camping trips at the race track. And so cute in the little mason jars.
Good, three recipes to try with oat flour. Four with oats in general. I'm excited. Now I just need the time.
