Day 11 - So Much Oatmeal

Oatmeal with soy milk and berries

This morning I made oatmeal for breakfast.  I have so much oatmeal that I can even give a bowl to my husband.  I'm making them in batches once a week and keeping it in the fridge.

I'm lucky to have a variety of fresh berries; little strawberries from my garden, blueberries from my brother's house, and mulberries gleaned from a tree.  I can also top my oatmeal this month with chopped apples or bananas.  Each serving ends up to be about 27 cents and that's mostly because of the cost of the soy milk.  I'm using a vanilla flavored soy milk and it gives this bowl a nice flavor.  And yes, I'm embarrassed to say that the earthenware bowl that it's in is from the 80's.

How do you like your oatmeal?  Please don't tell me you eat the ones out of a package.  Those have so much sugar it them and are expensive.  The serving size of the packages are small too.

My oatmeal box says that one serving size is 1/2 cup of dry oatmeal.  There is no way I can eat that much so I am ending up with leftovers.  What to do?  I thought I would try an experiment making them into cookies, so I chopped up a couple of chocolate peanut bars* and mixed them into the oatmeal.

Experimental oatmeal cookies before they were baked.

I baked them but without the fat and flour, they didn't crisp up.  However, I ate them and they were good enough for me.

I read that you can also fry leftover oatmeal on a griddle like a pancake.  I'd really like to make some kind of baked good with them to snack on though.  I'll have to think more about this. 

Yesterday, I had a good harvest of beans so I decided to roast them.  This is about a pound of different varieties.

They were trimmed, tossed with a little olive oil and garlic salt and baked on a cookie sheet for about 50 minutes.  Then, I decided to make them extra crispy, so I left them in the oven after I turned it off so that the beans would dry out more.

You can't tell by the picture, but the big bowl of beans reduced down to a small bowl of roasted beans and they are crispy snacks with lots of flavor.  They are now a savory snack.  I really like them and could eat this in one sitting if I'm not careful.

Day 11

Breakfast:
Oatmeal with soy milk and berries

Tennis:
Orange Juice

Lunch:
Egg & Avocado on Squaw Bread
Grilled zucchini
Loquats

Snack:
Oatmeal Choc Pnut Cookies

Dinner:
Bowl of pinto beans and 2 corn tortillas
Orange

Snack:
Roasted green beans

Calories: 1510
Cost: 87 cents

Weight:  XXX - 3.5 pounds

* The bag of Chocolate Peanut Bars were marked down to $1 and are in my budget.  2 bars cost 6 cents.