Day 291: Steel-Cut Oats & Barley
Stick a fork in me, I’m done. I might be overdone, in fact; I think I’m getting tough and bitter.
Is that even funny? I can’t tell… it’s after midnight and I just got home from teaching a cooking class in Red Deer – a class based on this blog, actually. We (I) made spaghetti carbonara with caramelized onions, blueberry bison meatballs, roasted veg with couscous and feta, lemon-Parmesan risotto with spinach and shrimp, pulled pork in the slow cooker, and sunken chocolate Black Forest cupcakes. For 26. Far too much of everything. All courtesy of the past 290 days. I’m bagged. And I have to get up in less than 6 hours to make 4 banana breads, spackle the bags under my eyes and get to an all-day event by 8.
This morning I made four pumpkin loaves using this recipe (I would have used a 14 oz can of pumpkin, but instead made two batches using half of a 28 oz can for each) and they seem to have turned out very well – of course they should really be classified as cakes, considering their sugar-flour ratio (3 cups of each!) – but at least they were made with canola oil.
I think M and W had a spinach pizza for dinner. Before I left I ate a big bowl of the steel-cut oats and barley I made for CBC on Tuesday and no one ate (fine – more for me). Barley cooks in the same time that steel-cut oats require, so I soaked them in a pot of water overnight and then turned the heat on in the morning for about 15 minutes; at the end I decided to add a shake of SunnyBoy (wheat, rye and flax) too, just to thicken it up and be insteresting. The result was a wonderfully chewy, grainy cereal that makes a perfect dinner drizzled with maple syrup and sprinkled with toasted almonds and sesame seeds. Then I cooked through the dinner hours and had a few forkfuls of pork, a couple broken cupcakes and the last of the cherry pie filling and whipped cream before climbing back into the car. (I have a secret love for cherry pie filling ever since the Hostess Fruit Pie ads in the backs of Archie Comics – they were only available in the states and I wanted them so bad.)
October 17 2008 | breakfast and grains | 32 Comments »
