Wipe that cheezy grin off your face

You know how you can get stuck in a food stereotype? Like the belief that some foods are meant to be sweet and other foods are meant to be savoury. For example, I always think of rice as a savoury food. It goes with gravy. But Spidergrrl, you cry, don’t you know  you can have sweet rice pudding?  Yeah, I know, I’ve never tried it so it doesn‘t count. In my mind, it’s gravy all the way. 

The first time this conundrum appeared to me was when I was a child reading a biography of  the author Louisa May Alcott who wrote the classic book Little Women. She and her sister were complaining that there was no sugar for the rice. What? SUGAR? For the RICE? The father then said there were plenty of poor people who would be happy to eat their rice sans sugar and he frogmarched them, bowls of rice steaming in their tiny hands, to a poor section of town where a widow and her small, very thin children lived. The children gobbled the rice down and were so grateful that the Alcott girls were quite subdued. They thought they lived in poverty because they had no sugar and here were children who had no rice. They vowed on the spot to give away one meal a week to this truly poor family. This lesson stayed with me for a long time, just not the bit about the sweet rice.

Oatmeal (or Goatmeal as it is referred to in my family)  is something I always think of a sweet. You put dried fruit in it or a drizzle of maple syrup. Of course it’s sweet. Was I not brought up in the south to know that grits=savoury, oatmeal=sweet? Or better still, that pie are round and cornbread are square???? But then I ran across this idea on Oh She Glows blog about a savoury, cheezy oatmeal and I wasn’t sure if I could change my perception of the role of goatmeal in life. But I tried it and I am sooooo glad I did.

Here’s her original post http://ohsheglows.com/2010/03/03/youre-so-cheezy/  and I basically did what she did but I used powdered broth not a stock cube and I made mine to be more instant rather than cooking on the stovetop cos to me goatmeal is a grab-and- go affair.

This is 3 TB oats and 3 TB Ready Brek which is basically fortified porridge oats ground up into a fine flour. It helps to make instant goatmeal creamier.

 

Then I added ½ tsp Marigold bouillon powder (I mix the regular vegan and low salt vegan together in a big jar)

Next I added 1 TB nutritional yeast flakes to give it that cheezy flavour.

Lastly a good sprinkle of something I bought from Sainsburys called Garlic Pepper--which does what it says on the tin. It is course ground pepper mixed with dried garlic granules.      

That’s it. Just add boiling water and stir and let it sit for a few minutes and Mmmmm, mmmmmm, good. This is definitely my new favourite flavour of goat. Dried fruit goatmeal is for boring people. Savoury goatmeal is where it’s at