a recipe

Fruited Irish Oatmeal

steel-cut oats cooked in a crockpot with apple juice, maple syrup, cinnamon, and dried fruit
serves 8

5 cups water
2 cups Irish steel-cut oats
1 cup apple juice
1/4 cup dried cranberries
1/4 cup golden raisins
1/4 cup dried apricots, cut into small pieces
1/4 cup pure maple syrup
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp. salt

In a 3 1/2 quart or bigger crockpot, combine all the ingredients. Cover and cook on low for 6 hours or on high for 3 hours. Serve with milk, brown sugar, honey, nuts, or whatever else you prefer on your oatmeal. You can use any dried fruit combination, and you can also leave the fruit out. Delicious stuff.

This recipe is from a crockpot (allstars?) magazine from 2003, I think. I got it from my sister.
I've got it cooking right now so I can eat it right before bed. I can't wait. I wish it would hurry up already.

ain't nothin' like the real thing, baby

This is one of my favorite scenes from Groundhog Day where Phil is repeating the same day over and over and he stops caring about everything and even tries to kill himself many times. Rita meets him at this diner where he is stuffing himself with just about everything possible-pancakes, pastries, milkshakes, donuts, coffee, etc.

RITA: Don't you worry about Cholesterol, Lung cancer, love handles?

PHIL: I don't worry about anything anymore.
RITA: What makes you so special? Everyone worries.
PHIL: That's exactly what makes me so special. I don't even have to floss.

After trying various sugar substitutes, I've decided that you can't really replace the real thing. With years of sugar-tasting experience under my belt, I can't pretend to be satistfied with "just as good as the real thing and better for you" gimmicks. Sometimes honey does a pretty good job, but not in cookies. We haven't cooked with sugar for a couple weeks now, and I'm finding myself wanting to eat the brown sugar straight out of the bag. So I would say sugar is definitely an addiction, what do you think?

junk food we're eating

Muddy Buddies CHEX mix. Good stuff, but if you eat too much of it, your tongue will hurt a bit.

What we've been eating

Steel-cut oats (from Posie gets Cozy) for breakfast one morning. Except we did ours in the crockpot overnight and added all kinds of dried fruits like cherries, assorted raisins, cranberries, etc. and added honey and rice milk instead of sugar and milk. Really delicious.

White Chili from Simply Recipes . This was really excellent. We put green onions, guacamole, sour cream and crushed tortilla chips on top. I could eat this everyday for the rest of my life and be happy. Also from Simply Recipes, Perfect Guacamole.


This is how our chili looked when we were finished. Buenisimo! We've made it twice in less than a week.

frog eye salad

Another creation that baffles me. We received some of the leftovers from a party last night. Honestly, it's not that bad, but I really want to know who comes up with these things! Although it's at just about every church gathering, I don't think it originates here. I would like to think so, but it doesn't. So if anyone knows the origins of this salad and of the gift of the magi bread, I would love to know. This "salad" includes marshmallows, cool whip, coconut, pineapple, mandarin oranges, optional maraschino cherries, and pasta called "acine de pepe". A lot of people believe that it's tapioca pudding and not this pasta that give this dish its famous tecture. This pasta, mixed with the other ingredients gives the appearance of frog eyes. I remember being told as a child, "Eat this salad. It's got frog eyes in it. You see?" My mom meant it to be fun, but my older siblings and father had me believing for years that it was really indeed frog eyes. So maybe that has something to do with my distate of this salad, or maybe it's the fact that all these ingredients really don't belong together in my opinion. Whatever the reason, it goes into my "bizarre recipes" collection. There are more to come, you can be sure of it. Or maybe I should do a piece on maraschino cherries and the places they don't belong. Hmm. Oh, and don't think you were leaving empty handed. I've got the recipe right here.