A Luxurious Midweek Treat

These days, most of my mornings involve a quick rummage through my fridge to see what’s available before a mad scramble to prepare my lunch for the day within minutes. Since I didn’t need to bring lunch to work today as I had lunch plans with a colleague, I figured why not spend the time preparing a slightly more luxurious (well, okay it’s not that hard to top a piece of toast sloppily slathered with creamy peanut butter and honey) breakfast- in the form of banana oat porridge with buttered apples.

This, I admit, did quite a bit of preparation the night before so as to shave off some time in the morning- the waiting and simmering time alone already required twenty minutes. So to avoid slaving over the stove and seriously hurting myself (I’m accident-prone enough fully awake- there’s no guarantee I’ll make it out of the kitchen alive that early in the morning), I let the oats sit in the bowl of hot water for ten minutes, peeled, cored and sliced the apple and soaked the slices in a very light sugar syrup to prevent discolouration as well as combined the rest of the ingredients in a bowl and let them all sit in the fridge overnight.

So come this morning, all I had to do was combine the softened oats and milk mixture over heat, cook the apple slices in some butter and vanilla sugar while the oats simmered for ten minutes and viola, I had myself a nice, warm bowl of banana oatmeal porridge with buttered apple slices.

It was such a good way to start a beautiful sunny morning. I was soothed, nurtured and all ready to start fighting the uphill battle of keeping my pants spotlessly white all day through work.

Banana Maple Oatmeal Porridge with Buttered Apples [adapted from Bill Granger's Sydney Food]

Ingredients
1/2 cups rolled oats
A small handful of raisins
3/4 cup boiling water
1/2 cup milk
Pinch of salt
Pinch of cinnamon
1/2 tsp light brown sugar†
1 tsp maple syrup†
1 banana, sliced thinly

Buttered apples
1 green apple, peeled, cored and thinly sliced
A knob of butter
A sprinkle of vanilla sugar††

1. Combine the oats, raisins and boiling water in a saucepan and let it sit for 10 minutes or until most of the water has been absorbed by the oats.
2. Add the rest of the ingredients to the oats mixture and bring the mixture to a boil before turning the heat down and letting it simmer for 10 minutes or until the oatmeal porridge is thick and the banana slices disintegrate into the porridge. Remove the saucepan from heat and let it sit while you prepare the buttered apple slices.
3. To make buttered slices Melt the butter in a small pan. Add the apple slices and sprinkle the vanilla sugar over the slices. Cook the slices till they softened and the undersides are golden brown. Flip the slices over and cook till they are completely golden brown. Remove the pan from heat. Serve the oatmeal porridge with the buttered apple slices and some maple syrup. Serves 2

† I drastically reduced the amount of sugar and maple syrup from the 1/2 tbsp and 1 tbsp called for respectively since the raisins were gonna sweetened the oat mixture.
†† I used vanilla sugar since that’s what I had on hand but caster sugar or brown sugar’s fine.

Posted by thecoffeesnob on March 18, 2009

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