oatmeal

I sell a lot of oatmeal at the Cafe. Do you want blueberries, strawberries, bananas, walnuts, currants or cranberries? Hot or cold, non-fat or whole milk? Brown sugar? Butter? Honey?

My dad has a very specialized way of eating oatmeal. It's more of an Operation. He adds milk first--to cool it down, but also so it's the right consistency. Loose, but not soupy. He folds the milk in with his spoon. His favorite kind of oatmeal comes from this place down the street from our house, Joanie's, where they cook the oatmeal in milk, rather than water.

At Joanie's, they serve oatmeal with three little metal cups of toppings--brown sugar, granola, and raisins. Always, the toppings arrive first and we all begin to nibble at the granola and raisins. Always, our waiter brings us a second set.

After he has added the milk, my dad picks out a section of the oatmeal, near the edge of the bowl, perhaps four square inches. And he adds the brown sugar. He carefully folds the brown sugar into this one patch of oatmeal until it has turned an inviting maple color. Then he adds a few raisins and a few clusters of granola. These are lightly folded in, and then he proceeds to eat those four square inches of oatmeal. Then the next four square inches are duly folded with brown sugar and then raisins and granola and then eaten.

He has this magic talent of budgeting his toppings--I can't remember him ever running out of one topping before the others, or before the oatmeal was all gone. He only ever complained that there wasn't enough brown sugar. He, like me, prefers his oatmeal a molasses-laced bowl of softness, almost a dessert.

On one of my last backpacking trips, we made oatmeal--not the decadent, refined stuff from Joanies, but a thick, bubbling cauldron of cinnamon-y cooked oats studded with dried fruits and nuts--cranberries, prunes, apricots, pecans, walnuts, raisins. The fruit swelled up and started to disintegrate. A totally different kind of sweet from brown sugar, but sweet nonetheless. We couldn't get enough--we were ravenous; the oatmeal was fuel.

I guess the oatmeal at the Cafe is alright--not as creamy as Joanie's, nor as flavor-packed as the camping oatmeal.

Most everyone is baffled, overwhelmed, when I ask them so many questions about their cereal. Some people know exactly how they like their oatmeal, and are annoyed when I ask the questions--it's as if they are saying--Can't you tell I'm a regular? Jeez. The thing that got me thinking, though, was that oatmeal is one of the foods at the Cafe where people really have to think about what they want. Egg scrambles are already created--ham and cheddar, spinach-feta-red onion, swiss chard and bacon. But oatmeal means they have to think, the oatmeal's a blank until they make it their breakfast.