This month I received 3 fan-mails and none of them were about how handsome I am, how smart I am, how nice I am, how funny I am, how great of a YES!+ teacher I am, nope, looks like people these days are not so impressed with any of that stuff. All 3 fan mails were about how much they love my oatmeal!
The emails go something like this:
"Hi Tony, I really miss your oatmeal, I love your oatmeal, I have dreams about your oatmeal!!! Oh by the way, how are you?"
Now in their defense, I do make the best oatmeal on planet earth. <--period I even got Swami Sukhchaitanya hooked on oatmeal. No joke, he's been having it every day for breakfast for at least 6 months now. If you know Swamiji like I do, you probably realize how impressive that is! So, to my current and future oatmeal fans, here it is at last:
Tony's Famous Oatmeal Recipe:
1) ADD OATSNatural oats, not the kind from a packet that's pre-flavoured, pre-cooked, and loaded with sugar. That later kind should be saved preciously in your gun cabinet and used on anyone you want to kill on the spot.
Get organic oats. You may think I'm being a little paranoid but my friends at Monsanto, have confirmed that their plans to completely destroy the planet are well underway and I figure we should at least give them a good run for their money!
Finally, don't get the quick 1-minute oats. Those things are pre-cooked. You want the joy of cooking them yourself so they can cook with all the right spices and get all the right flavours. Don't go to the other extreme and get those huge rolled oats kind that take weeks to cook and months to digest! Remember, middle path....always.
Finally the oatmeal boxes generally suggests 1/3 cup of oats per person. 1/3 cup is sufficient to feed a Smurf! Since most people make oatmeal that tastes like cardboard 1/3 of a cup is probably all you would want anyway. But with this recipe, you will actually enjoy and you WILL go for seconds. I would recommend 3/4 to 1 cup per person.
2) ADD MILK
To my vegan friends who get offended by dairy, notice I didn't say you had to add Cow's milk. I simply said milk! So it can just as well be soy milk, rice milk, almond milk, etc. When I was in Halifax recently we mixed goat's milk, almond milk and rice milk and it was delicious. So be creative. And yes, if you get cow's milk, it will be nice if your milk is organic and your cows are relatively happy.
READ CAREFULLY: This is the step where most people go terribly wrong!
Most people cook their oatmeal with water! Tsk Tsk Tsk. If I catch you doing that, I will come and smack you with that wooden spoon you were going to use to stir the oats. You can put 2/3 milk 1/3 water but that's the max as far as water goes.
3) ADD STUFF
Start with my secret ingredient that makes any oatmeal taste delicious: fennel seeds. They go in first because the longer they cook, the tastier the oatmeal.
Then add a dash of salt. Just a dash hein, it's not dahl!!
Add chopped almonds. If you don't have chopped almonds, here's an awesome tip: take almonds and chop them....you lazy North-American!!
You can add other quality nuts too like walnuts, pecan or cashews but please do me a favor, leave the bird-food out: no sunflower seeds, no pumpkin seeds!
Add raisins to make it sweet. Some people like to use dates instead. That's great if you're legally blind. Otherwise you will find that dates disintegrate into a mushy paste that reminds you of less pleasant things you don't want to see in your morning breakfast bowl. So stick to raisins, they don't disintegrate and will make your experience a lot more pleasant. Color and presentation is important!
4) ADD SWEETNESS
If you want to be true to Tony's famous recipe: Maple Syrup! Don't compromise on that!
Alternatives: Brown Sugar, Honey, Stevia, Succanat....all these are ok but I guarantee you, they won't give you the same "AHA!" moment when you taste the oatmeal for the first time.
Absolutely no white sugar, and if you add honey you should add it afterward. My Ayurveda friends say you should never boil honey. Besides, there are much better things you can do with your honey. Look at me, I married mine!
5) TUTTI FRUTTI!
Add fresh chopped peaches, pears, apples, bananas, grapes, pineapple, the more fruits your throw in, the less sugar you need to add and the tastier and more colourful your oatmeal becomes.
Heat stove at 2/3 of max and stir. Continue until oats are cooked. Serve it hot, not too hard, not too liquidy....remember middle path! Eat right away, while still hot.
Enjoy and let me know how it goes!
Big hug,