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My 2-year-old asks for oatmeal almost everyday! I usually make it with cinnamon and brown sugar, then stir in some peanut butter and milk, and top it with fresh fruit.

Sometimes I add ground flaxseed, dried fruits, nuts, or some pureed pumpkin. Whatever we have on hand that day.

That picture reminded me of one summer when I was about 7 or 8 when I decided that I wanted to grow oats (I was really fond of eating bowls of raw/dry rolled oats with maple syrup drizzled over top at the time). My very tolerant (and somewhat mystified) parents obligingly ordered the seed, and I used my bed of the garden (normally planted in zinnias or lettuce or some other quick rewarding kid-friendly crop) to plant a small stand of oats. When harvest time finally came around I was so disappointed to find that the grain was hard and round and pretty inedible - some how I'd expected them to come off the stalk in rolled oat form...

I'm all for some food snobbery and I do love steel-cut oats.

But sometimes a hot steaming bowl of good old Quaker oats just does it for me, especially when I refuse to pay 5.99 for a box of the steelies.

I heap mine with butter, brown sugar, craisins and walnuts.

I've heard that you can make steel-cut oats in a rice cooker, but I'm not quite sure how to go about it. Does anyone else do that, and can you give me some tips?

erin, what i do is make a big batch of steel-cut oats the regular way on sunday (undercooking a little bit) and then just reheat portions in the mornings.

you can also soak the oats overnight and then cook them up relatively quickly in the morning.

i think alton brown has a slow-cooker recipe. search foodnetwork.com.

erin,

I used a recipe from Recipezaar, and it worked great. I put the oats and water (3:1) into the rice cooker the night before. The next morning, set the cooker to Porridge and let it do it's thing. I'm not sure if it has to be set on the Porridge setting to work.

I've also toasted steel-cut oats and substituted them for the old-fashioned variety in an oatmeal muffin recipe as well as sucranat for brown sugar. The steel-cut oats gave the muffins a chewy texture, which I really liked.

When cooking steel-cut oats in the rice cooker, I made a mistake: it's 3 parts WATER to one part OATS.

I used to shy away from buying SteelCut oats because of the cooking time, but I guess you could use the rice cooker! Mine has a timer, so i will have that set to be cooked by the time I wake up. Thanks for the info!

Perhaps this is reason enough to buy a rice cooker? Whenever I try to make slow-cooker oatmeal I end up with a burned and gloopy mess. Totally inedible. What on earth do you think I'm doing wrong?