Oat MEAL.

Way back in the bad old graduate school days, my neighbor was a psych grad student and I was dirt poor, I mean poorer than I've been since I was babysitting for a living. I'd lost a job, my boyfriend at the time lived a bazillion miles away, my dissertation director was abusive, I was in the midst of both a divorce and a nasty sexual harassment debacle, and maybe not coincidentally, I wasn't writing. Which meant I wasn't finishing my dissertation, and that was bad, bad, bad. I cried. A lot.

I needed work, I thought. If I could do something, I would be okay. My neighbor, probably a do-gooder who pitied me, but at that point I didn't care, told me she needed someone to read her psych texts into a tape recorder so that she could listen to them as she drove, and she would pay me $10 or something a tape. They were the most boring books I ever read. At one point, she told me to stop yawning since it was dangerous: when I yawned, she did, and that made her sleepy, and after all -- she was driving, so could I PLEASE stop yawning. Yeah, I didn't.

[Right now I'm yawning. Typing the word makes me yawn. Saying it makes me yawn. What IS that?] [Holy crap. Watch the chimps yawn. Mirror neurons? Wow.]

But this was several weeks after she found me crying in the back yard of the trashy little house I rented (and loved) [search Woodrow St, Athens, GA at this site]. She told me I was depressed, and asked why I didn't come over and have some oatmeal and we could talk.

Her name was Amy, she was very concerned in a nice maternal way, and I hated oatmeal. I said, yes, (snork, sniffle), expecting at least to find comfort, if not good food.

This is Amy's oatmeal, minus the mashed banana, only because my bananas weren't ripe. And I ate probably three bowls of it that morning. Afterwards, I went home and threw away my instant oatmeal packets -- never even thought twice again about buying those shitty little envelopes of pre-made oat-refuse my mother'd pawned off as oatmeal. What Amy made, and that crap, are not even kin. I'm telling you what.

What you'll need:

Oatmeal -- I've gotten snobby and buy steel-cut oats (they have their own website!), but plain Quaker regular-cook oats will do

water

dried fruit (here, raisins and dates)

nuts

applesauce or finely diced apples

a little butter and sugar (maple syrup is also good)

Milk or cream if you like to eat your oatmeal that way, though I don't.

Oats cook at a 3:1 ratio: three parts water to one part oats. For three people, if you're having toast, 3 c water, 1 c oats. If you're feeding Chuck (search Bowie on this website), this feeds two people, with toast. One if he's really hungry.

If you're doing just these servings, you'll need about a 1/3 c nuts, 1/2 c dried fruit, 1/4 c applesauce or one small apple, about a TBSP butter and a tsp of sugar.

Boil the water with a little salt, maybe a tsp or so. Add oats (and if you are using diced apple, the apple), stir once, return to boil, turn heat to low, cover, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the water is absorbed.

Meantime, break up the pieces of nut into bite-sized bits with your hands. In a small frying pan, melt a little butter and toast the nuts over medium heat. When they smell like toasted nuts (intensely nut-smelling) and start to turn deeper brown, sprinkle with about a tsp of brown or white sugar and take off the heat.

When the oats have absorbed all the water, add the nuts, dried fruit, and applesauce. If you're using just diced apple, you may want to add about 1/2 tsp cinnamon and a little sugar. Stir. Taste. Adjust salt (for more intense taste); sugar (for more sweetness); or butter (for more richness).

Eat. Think of Amy who was kind to me when I needed it. Thank you, Amy.

There you go.

Innard's Wisdom; or Dog Gizzardry

Thanksgiving's over, and here you are holding a bunch of crap you pulled out of the chest and neck cavities of your turkey. You might also have a platter full of cartilage or other non-bone turkey refuse. I know I did.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to Lucy Curzon (in this picture, she's all the way to the left) about the organic carrot /cranberry/ etc. dog biscuits she was making. I wanted the scoop -- the recipe, but not really, just the chemistry of it I guess.

"Nothing processed," she said. "And stay away from cornmeal, and of course grapes and raisins."

"But," I said, "what holds it all together? Egg? what?"

"Egg. And peanut butter. Also, use whole wheat flour, but oats are better."

So yeah, egg? That felt sort of Harry Potter-y, sort of Three Weird Sisters-y. I don't know. I don't credit any egg with that kind of power.

[Musical interlude: Oh oh oh! It's magic, you know!/ Never believe it's not so!...]

[Giblets are, in fact, so much more profound than bad 70s Brit-pop. We all know the words, right? But if you type them out, it's really mortifying.]

Anyway, on Friday last week, I found myself with a pan of boiled innards and nothing to do with them. Also, some leftover vegetable soup. Suddenly, I thought: DOG BISCUITS. And thus I began to experiment.

The first thing I did was put the giblets and their boiling water in the food processor with a few spoons of the leftover soup (carrots, peas, potatoes, some other stuff). Then I blended it to the consistency, as Chuck said, of fresh vomit. We commented on how we could still see the chunks of stuff. Ah, nostalgia. College was a blast.

In an enormous white bowl, I dumped in some wheat flour, a lot of oats, and four big spoonfuls of unsweetened peanut butter (with flax, though that's only because that's the peanut butter I have). I rubbed the peanut butter into the grains like I would do for the topping for an apple crisp -- thoroughly, so that the end product looks like oaty sand.

Then I dumped in the macerated giblets, water, and vegetables. Mixed, added oats, added more oats, added all the rest of the flour, moved to regular flour, and finally got a dough I could knead. Which I did, on a floured cupboard. I cut off a piece, about a quarter of the whole loaf, stuck the larger part in foil and froze it, then rolled the smaller part out thin. Cut it into squares with a sharp knife (because oats are hard to cut).

Then I set the squares on an ungreased cookie sheet, and baked them at 325 for about 25 minutes, or until most of them, when pressed, don't give and all of them are a little darker brown. They'll firm up a little as they cool, but you still want them pretty hard, like crackers, when they come out.



My dogs LOVE these. They REALLY LOVE Lucy's biscuits, too.

There you go.