One of my new favorite things is steel cut Irish oats, and my kids really love them, too. The original takes as much as 30 minutes to cook on the stove top, but the “Quick and Easy” ones take just 5-7 minutes. Dr. Sears recommends cooking the regular steel cut oats in the crockpot overnight, which we’ll be trying soon at school. I do know that they reheat well if you cook a big batch.
My kids love to put a pat of butter, brown sugar and cinnamon in them. My favorite is to stir in a tablespoon of Central Market Organics blueberry preserves and top with a little milk. Devine! My kids especially love it if I call the oats “porridge” and recount the story of “The Three Bears”, but that might be best saved for a weekend morning . . . My oldest loves that they came from Ireland, another country so far away. She feels worldly, and so do I. And, yes, the teacher in me admits to showing her a picture of Ireland to get her amped up for her oats one morning. We both respond to the exotic and dramatic.
Needless to say, Irish oats are a great source of fiber, and unlike rolled oats or quick oats, really fill you up for the long haul! I guess that’s why the Irish have been eating them since, well, to quote the McCann’s website: “The use of oats for human consumption was well established in Ireland very early in the Christian era, for we find references to oatmeal in the Great Code of Civil Law, compiled about the year A.D. 438. There is evidence that even before this date, porridge was recognised in Europe as a characteristically Irish food.”
~Leslie
