Oatmeal deluxe

Daffodil old style 2011 03 early

An old variety of daffodil that came with our house. It’s in the lawn, not a flowerbed.

My new favorite breakfast is what I call oatmeal deluxe (with dried fruit and cinnamon/ginger)—and I didn’t eat oatmeal willingly for decades after a childhood encounter when I was in the hospital after having my tonsils removed. I remember I had a coloring book before I went in to introduce me to what would be happening, called Tommy’s Tonsillectomy. I liked that it had a big word in the title.

Anyway, I felt weird when I came out from under sedation. I don’t remember if Tommy discussed that much, but I was unprepared for the sense of altered reality.

I entered the hospital as an unenthusiastic oatmeal-eater, but when they brought me a bowl of light blue oatmeal* the morning after the surgery when my throat felt terrible, I felt skewered by reality and became a quiet non-fan of oatmeal. Besides, it was a gluey lump and not particularly warm.

I stayed a non-fan until sometime last fall, when I developed this recipe, with powdered cinnamon and ginger, and added dried fruit. Yum.

* Mom told me much later that someone at the hospital thought if they added food coloring kids would eat more readily. Not.

4 comments

  1. kayak woman says:

    I ate cottage cheese until I was five (?) and had scarlet fever (with hallucinations that I can still remember). At one point during my recovery, there was a bowl of cottage cheese next my bed and my little brother came along and stashed an old chewed up blue crayon (one of his ‘gars, aka cigars). That incident was not a hallucination and I do not eat cottage cheese now.

  2. kayak woman says:

    That would be stashed an old chewed up blue crayon (yada yada) in MY COTTAGE CHEESE! 🙂

  3. Pooh says:

    Blue? There aren’t very many natural blue foods. Maybe adding red or orange, but blue?

  4. Sammy says:

    Exactly.