Cooking With Oats

While eating healthy is our prerogative... cooking savory and healthy isn't always easy. specially if you want to cook a non-pre-tested recipe. but the adventurous ones try. Succeed sometimes. fail mostly. but they try... because they must. for the love of food and the love of their lives... 

So there I was. after my success with the cheesy oatmeal pinwheels I was enthused to bake some more using the oatmeal flour that remained. and that led me to a series of complete disasters and a world of knowledge... as it turns out... oatmeal flour though healthy isn't as easy to work with as all-purpose-flour. because oats have a high amount of phytic acid which blocks mineral absorption. and this interferes (as it did in my case) from making these healthy banana oat breakfast cookies using oatmeal flour instead of old-fashioned oats. so what my ignorance led me to... were these spongy lumps of health.. which were not savory at all.

armed with my newly gained knowledge about oats i then tried my hands at vegan dates-biscotti. now that i knew better.. i soaked the oats overnight, oven dried them then ground them for my next venture.

but guess what ... there were other issues that this non-cook was still ignorant about. turns out that it isn't easy to roll a sugarless-butterless mixture of pureed dates, applesauce, flax seed, almonds and  a 4:1:1 ratio of oatmeal flour, whole wheat flour and all-purpose flour into a log for biscotti.  specially so.. if there is a spread of nutella on it... anyhow even if one manages to get past this step .. all the effort is not worth it. for though tasty, the final product that you get, after freezing the roll for 30 minutes and then baking it twice... can hardly qualify for a biscotti.  it just does not have the crunch....

though your son may approve of it...

this combination just doesn't work....

now after meeting with two failures in a row, tonight I decided to play it safe.  i tried paula deen's strawberry cobbler. following the exact instructions... only substituting quick oats with ground oats (because I had it already and read here that it will work).. I made 2 ramekins of the cobbler. and yes. it was AWESOME. not too sweet and yet sweet enough. Nishi and I loved it.. Also, i loved the simplicity of the recipe. just cut the strawberries.. add sugar and go about your business. return in 30 minutes to add the cornflour-batter.. add the oat flour-sugar-butter-cinnamon crumble on top and let the oven do the rest of the job.  and 30 minutes later... YUMMM... what a delicious dessert !!

so that was that. two failures and one success. Yay!! i can live with that. for now i am two-failures older at baking with oats.. and who knows i probably will get lucky the next time or the time after and bake something as delicious as the cobbler :)  so stick around and expect more oatmeal recipes here...

till next time...
take care.