Just Put Oats In It...

A few days ago, Fred was doing an inventory of the fridge and dragged out the covered glass bowl of cream cheese icing that had been rejected by our daughter as not stiff enough to crown her batch of cupcakes.

Fred has a longstanding tradition of mixing oats in with everything - or adding anything to oats - and putting it in the microwave. I used to complain about having my carefully saved leftover vegetable soup thickened with oats and a splash of umeboshi vinegar and fried in leftover chicken fat.

I kept trying to explain to him that I liked my oats sweet, not savoury... but recently we've come to an agreement -
I let him follow his culinary muse, and he only modifies single portions of the leftovers. Sometimes they smell so delicious that I ask him for a taste - like the concoctions he's been making recently, salted with our home-fermented kimchi.

When he knows I'm not interested in the item he's found, as was the case with this cream cheese icing, he uses it all up. He filled the bowl up with large flake rolled oats and added some of a mixture he'd made of home made cranberry sauce and some candied lemon peel of mysterious origin. Then he spooned it onto a cookie sheet and put it thicken (and perhaps dry?) in the warming oven of the wood stove (which wasn't warm at the time). I found his damp and crumbly batch there next day, and insisted on test-baking one of the damp crumbly confections.

Our cookstove oven door is off these days, and the oven is stuffed with firewood, to dry off their icy dampness (as you'll see in my previous post). The resulting "oat macaroon" was hard and crisp and delicious - so into the toaster oven the whole batch went -- and none of them burned! They are crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside, and taste marvellous! Perfect rescue nuggets for an insulin dependent diabetic, and unlikely to be touched by a dieting wife…. but he has to be careful about the pieces of lemon rind - some of them are kinda tough to chew.

Fred's opportunistic and non-standard cuisine has even won an expensive saucepan in a food-zine contest, by writing an account of how this uses up leftovers...

Deachman, Cindy. 2007 Solo Food contest results [“First prize goes to Frederick W Schueler...”] Burnt Toast 5(4):16

"...place about a meal's worth (this will be really about two meal's worth, so if you're diabetic take extra insulin) of the leftovers and oats in a frying pan, douse with broth (or water tempered with enough seasonings and pickle juice to stand in for broth), sprinkle with seasonings that will complement the other ingredients, and bring to a boil, attending the panfull with a spatula, until it's reduced in volume and starts to brown on the bottom (be sure to include some oil among the seasonings if the leftovers are deficient in fat).

"Prepare a mugful of coffee, wine, or Inka, depending on the circumstances, obtain an easy reading book, such as Wodehouse on Jeeves, Lister on _the Hard Way to Haparanda,_ or Morgan on _the Puritan Dilemma,_ and settle down to await the phone call that will reassure you that your loved ones have arrived safely at their remote destination, and that you'll be able to spend the coming week working through the deposits of leftovers they've left in the fridge, so that when they come back they'll have free scope to go out and buy groceries in order to start the cycle again. Thus, as they'd have said on Roke, is equilibrium maintained."

We've seen many households where both the boiled peels and the runny frosting would have been discarded - the concept of "organic waste" which it took us some time to wrap our minds around when it began to be discussed in relation to Ottawa's 'green boxes.'

Before we were an item, we both participated in the downstairs kitchen of Agassiz House, in Toronto, which based its economy on the super-abundant garbage of the neighbouring Kensington Market. Later, we scavenged and dumpster-dove all across Canada through the 1970s and 1980s. Living again in Toronto as I finished the artwork for my first published book, and Fred finished his thesis, we prepared skeletons of 93 species of fish from the Kensington Market garbage of the Archeological Identification Centre, thriving on the scavenged fruits and vegetables that we found in the course of being urban hunter-gatherers.

Compactors and food banks preclude this kind of store-based foraging in these latter days, but we still find ourselves being given things others don't choose to eat, from runny frosting to Bear meat, and there are weeds in the garden and mushrooms in the trees.