Damn it, Alton Brown!

I have a particular problem with Alton Brown.  I mean, besides the problem of wanting to kidnap him and keep him in my attic and love him forever.  I want to eat everything he cooks.  All of it!  He makes all of it look good, even the stuff I don’t like.  Eggplant?  Why yes, I’ll try it.  I mean, I’ve never like it before, but I probably wasn’t cooking it right.

Well, maybe I wasn’t cooking it right, that’s debatable, but eggplant is still disgusting.  I’m reminded of a coworker who tried to pick a fight about venison, insisting that I don’t like it because I don’t cook it right.  Bullhockey, my friend.  I don’t like it because IT DOESN’T TASTE GOOD.

Anyway, this problem I have makes watching Good Eats a dangerous proposition because I start thinking I need to cook whatever AB is cooking.  There are issues with this:

1. I’m a pretty good cook, but I am not at Alton Brown level.
2. I do not typically keep bricks, terra-cotta planters, or spare coolers around for my culinary adventures.
3. I am not an adventurous eater.

Add to all my own issues the fact that I can get my children to eat ANYDAMNTHING if I tell them it’s an AB recipe.  After all, Alton has brought us our Thanksgiving turkey, our indoor steak cooking method, curry chicken pot pie, the proper coffee ratio  and, most recently, donuts.  A lot of my go-to recipes are from Good Eats.  There’s no denying his brilliance, even if he sometimes complicates things for no apparent good reason.  (Surely I am not the only one who saw the episode when he smoked a salmon in a hotel room with a hot plate and a cardboard box??  Jeezy peasy, you order takeout in a hotel.  That is what takeout is FOR.)

via foodnetworkfans.com

Anyway.  The other night Hubs and I saw the oatmeal episode.  Now, I am not a fan of oatmeal.  When I was a child, I was not a breakfast eater, yet my mother routinely force fed served oatmeal for breakfast and required that I eat some.  I won’t say that’s the reason I eschew oatmeal in my adulthood, but it probably is.  (Love ya, Mom!)  Although I don’t eat it, I do like to serve it to my son.  It’s healthful, it’s an easy breakfast and it’s filling enough that I don’t have to listen to a whole damn soliloquy about how he starved all morning at school.  (I’m not neglecting my daughter.  She’s not a breakfast eater, either.  I don’t fight it.  If you can’t figure out when you should eat by the time you’re thirteen, then maybe you deserve to get hungry.)

So, naturally, I was intrigued by the prospect of AB’s overnight crock pot oatmeal.  I decided to make it last night and have a nice warm breakfast for this morning, and hopefully enough leftovers to get me through the week with the boy, because apparently you can’t eat Cheerios if you have an extremely loose tooth.  Let me just say first, I KNOW it was my fault.  I accept full responsibility.  Well, not full.  I do blame Wal-Mart a little.  I botched the recipe.  Completely.  Here’s the issue.  The recipe clearly called for steel-cut oats.  I know for a fact that my local Food Lion carries steel-cut oats, so I just assumed that Wal-Mart would, also.  Well, you know what happens when you assume, right?  That’s right, you end up standing in Wal-Mart muttering curses so fierce that the employee stocking shelves starts blushing.

Important note.  Steel cut oats and rolled oats ARE NOT interchangeable.  A smart girl wouldn’t have tried it, but I carried boldly on.  It’s just oatmeal, right?  Nah, it’s really oatmeal soup now.  Oatmeal soup stuck to the sides of my crock pot with all those expensive dried blueberries completely WASTED.  Apparently steel-cut oats require a whole lot more cooking liquid than rolled oats.  And to add insult to injury, I check the cooking directions on the side of the oatmeal to see if I could manage to produce some kind of breakfast today.  You know how long it takes to cook oatmeal on the stove top?  Five minutes.  I just slow cooked a five-minute product for eight hours.  And ruined some perfectly good blueberries in the process.

I give up.  They can have bananas for breakfast.