Parmesan Oatmeal
If you enjoy eating veal, chicken, or eggplant Paremasan, then consider this: Back in the mid eighties, I discovered how wonderful plain oatmeal can taste when you add some grated Parmesan cheese. Delicious!
At that time, I cooked the oatmeal and then added the cheese as it came off the stove. This tasted great. However, as the cheese melted, it became very stringy, and once entangled in the tongs of the fork as it cooled, it stuck there, like stubborn glue. So, cleaning the fork and all those little crevices between each point became monumentally hard.
Therefore, in the early nineties, I tried using instant rolled oats but did not add water or heat them in any way. I’d just pour a cup or so from the can into a bowl, dry, and then add about a half a cup of the cheese. This made for a delightfully chewy and flavorful snack, and if you eat enough, it can fill you up for several hours.
The cheese dominates the flavor, as oatmeal has a very mild or neutral effect on the palate. So depending on how much of a cheese lover you are, you may prefer just a couple tablespoons of it. But if you’re like me, who is an avid cheese fan, roughly one part cheese per part of oatmeal makes the concoction taste best. 50-50.
However, keep in mind that oatmeal as well as Parmesan cheese are both very calorie-dense foods; with the grain providing lots of starchy carbs and the Parmesan offering much saturated fat. So this dish is probably good for neither your cholesterol nor triglycerides; particularly if you consume lots of other calories besides this in a day. Indeed, a small amount of this breakfast-turned-Italian-dinner mixture goes a very long way calorie wise. A typically-sized cereal bowl filled three quarters of the way up, nets you the better part of a thousand calories. So be careful. But do enjoy, just the same. It’s so easy to do with this very simple yet tasty snack. 