Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to find a new oat recipe and try it this week. Bonus points for including more oats in your regular schedule!

Impact Ratings:
Level of Commitment: Baby Steps

Our Super Foods for the week are:  oatmeal, sunflower seeds, and the honorable mention “whole grains”.  Look for the Food for Thought this evening to find out why oats are so good for you and worthy of Super Food status.  I’m planning an entire month on whole grains later, so we won’t do much with these this week.

You are probably either on the whole grain bus or know that it’s out there already.  A bonus mission for you passerbys can be:  Learn to read bread ingredients. I’ll post later this week to teach you how to decipher the various terms on the bread bags.

Added Bonus:  Oats are an extremely inexpensive whole grain. You can buy them in bulk and save even more money, or do as I do and get them at Save-a-Lot.  Do opt for rolled oats over quick oats for more nutrition.

So flip through your “to try” recipe stack/folder/binder and see if there’s a good one with oats in it, or find something totally new on the Internet.  Blogs are a great source of recipes, you can simply Google it if you’ve got something in particular you’d like to try, or start with allrecipes.com, 101cookbooks.com or Foodbuzz.

Oats are used in all sorts of yummy goodness.

• There are countless baked oatmeal recipes out there; I’ve had good success with Kelly the Kitchen Kop’s (plus I know Sue, who adapted the recipe, personally, so that’s fun!).
• I regularly make my own granola and will post the recipe for you this week.
• Muffins and cookies are popular oatmeal categories.
• Oatmeal is often in meatloaf recipes.
• Oatmeal based breads are fun, and I made a pie crust this weekend that called for oats.
• Don’t want to turn on your oven?  I don’t blame you if the temps are high in your neck of the woods.  You can find stovetop meatloaf, cookie, granola, and (of course) porridge recipes.
• Even if you just incorporate oatmeal into your breakfast where you don’t usually, you’re doing great!  Oatmeal trumps breakfast cereal because:
  1. It is waaaaaaaay less expensive than boxed cereals.
  2. It is less processed, therefore you’re closer to the field and God’s intended product.
  3. No random additives; you know what you put in it.
  4. Oats are a power-packed grain; see Food for Thought for more.
  5. Breakfast cereals are extruded grains, a process that may greatly reduce health benefits of your whole grains and possibly even cause detrimental side effects.

  Note:  All of this of course applies to *real* oatmeal, not instant oatmeal.  That stuff IS highly processed, DOES include random additives, and is NOT as healthy as real oats.

What other categories am I missing?  What kind of oats do folks like to use (rolled, steel-cut, groats…)?  If you have a superstar oatmeal recipe, we’d love to see it in the comments (feel free to link to a blog post of your own).

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If you missed the last Monday Mission, click here.

Kitchen Stewardship is dedicated to balancing God’s gifts of time, health, earth and money.  If you feel called to such a mission, read more at Mission, Method, and Mary and Martha Moments.