Oatmeal
Way back at the beginning of the year, I had my annual physical, and the blood work showed my cholesterol was high, along with the usual suspects: triglycerides, LDL:HDL ratio, and so on. I was also 10-15 pounds heavier than I usually am. This is what happens when you schedule routine medical exams just after the holidays and a month of eating very well: we only ate at a few French restaurants, but it felt like we were having foie gras every day for a week. That and bacon. There was also very little exercise in December beyond watching TV.
Anyway, after seeing a Good Eats episode on oatmeal, I’ve started eating a lot of the stuff for breakfast. The main benefits are: the basic physical limitation where the more oatmeal one eats, the less bacon and eggs one has in the same meal (I typically don’t have bacon and/or eggs, so this isn’t that big a deal); lots of fiber, contributing both bulkiness in the insoluable form and bile-absorption in the soluble form. And the more bile taken away, the more cholesterol goes away. My liver is happier, in any case.
Oatmeal comes in a variety of forms in the grocery store, according to Alton Brown. There’re groats, which are pretty close to being the raw oat. It’s a pain to cook. Groats that have been put through an industrial food processor and sliced up into 2 to 4 smaller pieces are called steel-cut oatmeal. You can find tins of the stuff on the supermarket shelf, possibly labelled as “traditional” or “Irish” oatmeal. Typically, it takes about 30 minutes of simmering on the stove to cook these, but they have a nice, chewy texture. Steel-cut oats that have been steamed and then mashed flat by giant rollers are rolled oats, and are what you find in the big Quaker Oats cylinders; it’s what you think of oatmeal if you’re an American. This cooks in about 10 minutes, but can be a bit gummy; they’re better for making granola and cookies than eating outright, compared to the steel-cut variety. At the bottom of the ladder, and the most processed, is instant oatmeal. This is somehow made from rolled oats (presumably with smaller pieces) and precooked so that it’s a matter of just adding hot water.
Note that steel-cut oatmeal can be bought pretty cheaply by going to the local health food store and taking a bagful from the bulk food bins. The 74th Street Fairway has it upstairs for about $0.85/lb, which is probably high compared to the rest of the country, but damn cheap compared to the tins of McCann’s Traditional Irish Oatmeal, which is apparently close to $3/lb. The 137th Street Fairway doesn’t have the bulk bins. I have no idea about the Long Island one.
I’ve found that the standard rice cooker pretty much every East Asian household has is pretty good at making steel-cut oatmeal. The only change is the water:oats ratio, which should be a bit more than 2:1. If you toss in dried cranberries, use a 2.5:1 ratio. If you have to add water to the hotplate portion of the rice cooker (which I do with my model), the water should be aimed at running the rice cooker for about 30 minutes, i.e., at the “4-cups of rice” line on the measuring cup. Less fuss than cooking oatmeal on the stovetop: whenever I’ve done that, I think I’ve had a 25% oatmeal attrition rate to the crust at the bottom of the pot, since I’m disinclined to stand and stir for 30 minutes in the morning. Cleanup is fairly easy, since there’s nothing burnt at the bottom.
So, does a public discussion about oatmeal and cholesterol mean that I’m now in my mid-30s? I’ve been complaining about achy legs and general soreness for the past couple of years, but I know why that’s happening.