Recipe #46: steel cut oatmeal

 This recipe is by special request for a special friend who recently found a mini slow cooker at a thrift store. That’s where you find mini slow cookers. Nobody buys them new. They spontaneously generate themselves at thrift stores. Just make sure you clean them within an inch of their existence.

Apparently my friend is more conscientious about second hand electrical kitchen appliances than I, and she looked online to learn how to use the mini slow cooker. I did no such thing and assumed, like regular slow cookers, they could be used safely for hours at a time. Apparently the mini slow cookers are only intended to be used for a mini amount of time: four hours maximum. I’m going to pretend that I never heard this information and will continue to throw caution to the wind with my second hand mini, but you, dear reader, should take this information as a caveat to this recipe, and if you decide to use it recklessly like me, and your thrift store mini slow cooker explodes after four hours of use, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Ingredients:


Maybe don’t use oats that are almost three years past their “best before” date, although I always like to say: it says “best before”, not “poison after”:


Directions:

The night before you want your steel cut oats for breakfast (or, if you’re a rule follower, four hours before you want to eat them), schmear the inside of the mini slow cooker with butter:


We do this to prevent sticking and a miserable clean up.

Add one cup of water and 1/3 cup of steel cut oats:


Add one small cut up apple and about a teaspoon of ground cinnamon:


Stir it up, put on the lid, plug it in, and go to bed (for four to eight hours, depending on your comfort level with risky home appliance online instruction noncompliance):


The next morning, you will awaken to the smell of warm apples and cinnamon and a hearty hot breakfast:


Add brown sugar to taste:


And if you want it to be 35% better, drizzle some 35% whipping cream into your bowl:


I only had 10% coffee cream, so mine was only 10% better.

And fun facts: nothing exploded, the clean up was easy after a few minutes soaking the mini’s inner bowl with warm water, and the almost three years expired oats tasted fine and didn’t kill me even a little bit!

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