the oatmeal.
Hi All!
will likely keep this fairly quick because I am trying to learn how to get the shipping calculator to work on the upcoming online store (!) and how is it 1:32pm already?
Yesterday I was contacted by a member of The Vancouver Sun about the food photos I post on Instagram- apparently they want me to participate in their Gastropost community- what an honour!
Although, yes, I do have a chocolate company, I really wouldn’t consider myself to be a “foodie”. A politically correct and non-offensive, carefully selected definition from Urban Dictionary states that a “foodie” is:
A person that spends a keen amount of attention and energy on knowing the ingredients of food, the proper preparation of food, and finds great enjoyment in top-notch ingredients and exemplary preparation.
A foodie is not necessarily a food snob, only enjoying delicacies and/or food items difficult to obtain and/or expensive foods; though, that is a variety of foodie.
Not quite me. If it is vegan, I am happy. If it is vegan and healthy? I am very happy! … that’s about it. If I don’t have to cook it myself? … living. the. dream.
Oh, and organic. Gotta love being nice to hard working farmers and the planet, too.
I try to take photos of food I make because I know people love it and because if I make something that looks nice, I am pretty proud of where my simple chopping and blending skills have taken me. And having a food business probably means that, for social media purposes, people want to see food. I unfortunately can’t get away with eating chocolate all day, so I can’t just post Zimt photos. And when I do eat Zimt, it is usually just eating a bit of a bar or product unfit for regular human consumption.
But this morning, I decided to try to incorporate some raw cacao tastiness into my breakfast- and I came up with this:
Overnight Instant Steel Cut Oat Chia Banana Cinnamon Zimt Oatmeal or OISCOCBCZO to make it sound extra tasty.
I had a general idea of what I wanted to make, as I had some inspiration from Angela over at Oh She Glows. And, as Angela references, culinary brilliance and lovely local cookbook author, Dreena Burton, suggests grinding steel cut oats to speed up cooking/soaking time. So that and this is what I did:
Step 1: put your steel cut oats in a high
speed blender, such as a Vita Mix.
Step 2: Blend briefly- you don’t want a fine
flour, just not a super coarse grain.
At this point, you can store extra steel cut oats in a jar or something- make lots so you will have them on hand!
Step 3: I think you can take it from here. Pst- cheat notes under the photos!
Cover with hemp milk, by far the easiest nut/seed milk to make at home. That’s why it is the one I choose to make. You literally just blend a few tablespoons of hemp seeds (hulled) with a few cups of water. No straining!
Step 4: sprinkle with cinnamon, and stir lots. Put in the fridge. Clean up the kitchen, go work out, catch up on some paperwork- or just do all this before you go to bed so you can wake up to an excellent oatmeal canvas.
Step 5: Bananaify. Step 6: Chocolateify.
Recipe (makes 1 serving, but kinda small…)
50 g steel cut oats, measured after grinding (maybe ⅓ of a cup)
¼ tsp ground cinnamon
1 T chia seeds
½ cup milk of choice (hemp was excellent!) + water as needed
1 sliced banana
1 square of Zimt (will try with Coconut Crisp, too. Kaffee would be tasty, as would Sugar & Spice)
Combine dry ingredients (the first three). Stir- and then add hemp milk. Stir. Set in fridge. Too thick? That’s ok. Add water. Stir. Set in fridge. Keep busy, or at least look like you are, while you wait. Or sleep, if it is late.
Once the oats & chia have absorbed most all of the liquid, chop up some sliced banana on top! And finish with some coconut sugar sweetened raw chocolate =)
Then, eat it! Or provide someone with a very tasty breakfast.
About the oatmeal- why steel cut? Why not just rolled? Personally, I like rolled a lot more, because they are quicker to cook and you can make oatmeal raisin or chocolate chunk oatmeal cookies out of them. But steel cut are apparently somewhat of a super star, so I wanted to try them out. As Prevention.com outlines, the debate is probably not worth writing about beyond this sentence! They seem to be yet another fad in the health food industry. Personally, I would say, so long as it is ethical, so long as you don’t stress out about it, and so long as you legitimately feel good after eating something (after having done so with an open mind, so as to not feel guilty about not eating a particular type of oat or berry or whatever)- go for it.
A steel cut experiment. Maybe people have more positive associations with “getting cut” as opposed to “getting roll-y”. Hehe.
Signing out on this Thursday afternoon! Enjoy it. =)
Emma
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