appreciating oatmeal

Steel-cut oats, Scottish oats, old-fashioned rolled oats, quick-oats, and oat bran. These are my morning ingredients for sustained energy and discipline. Oatmeal is to me as shrimp is to Bubba from Forrest Gump. If shrimp is like the fruit of the sea, oatmeal is the meal of the oats of the land… right, not quite sure what I was going for there. Plain oats will do just fine, but we can make oats with bananas, cinnamon and brown sugar, peanut butter, jam, coconut flakes, almond slices, and eggs. There’s overnight oats, slow-cooked oats, microwaved oats, and uncooked oats. Considering the set of adjectives one could prefix and suffix to oats or oatmeal we have a large finite set of potential oatmeals that I hope to explore in the coming mornings. Tea-steeped overnight oats… espresso-steeped overnight oats… tiramisu with overnight oats… not-overnight overnight oats? Let’s be real: I microwave and eat the same oatmeal recipe every morning.