I couldn’t believe this recipe when I first saw it in Al Ha Shulchan magazine. Dead easy, but so much butter. According to them, it originates in Denmark, where butter reigns. Well, Israel has a thriving dairy industry too, and our butter is excellent. Normally I wouldn’t think of cooking a vegetable with a whole cup of butter - a whole cup of butter – but after I made it, I understood the wisdom.

The cauliflower steams until the butter’s water has evaporated and the vegetable acquires a brown, even black layer where it lay on the bottom of the pan. In the meantime, it has acquired a layers of deep and light flavors…just indescribably delicious.

More good news is, you don’t have to eat all that melted butter. Once you take the cooked cauliflower out, it’s up to you whether to just drizzle a little of that savory butter over it or ignore the butter. Or go for it and pour everything over the vegetable, to let the diners mop it up with fresh bread. Or let it cool, stash it in the fridge, and use some to flavor other dishes. You might have to strain it.

The only big deal about this recipe is fitting the cauliflower into the right size pot. There should be almost no spare room between it and the pot, as you want the slow evaporation to work its magic with diluting the butter. To make this happen, I jam thick slices of unpeeled potatoes around the cauliflower, creating the necessary tight fit. Don’t be tempted to add carrots or other vegetables or even the cauliflower leaves; all release juice. You want the pure taste of cauliflower and butter, and potatoes don’t interfere with that.

The other thing is – it takes an hour and half. But we love slow food, don’t we? Anyway, it takes minutes to put up and then you just forget about while you’re busy with other things.

Caramelized Cauliflower (with potatoes)

Serves 4

Ingredients:

1 cup non-salted butter

1 clean medium cauliflower without leaves, stem trimmed

1-2 medium potatoes, scrubbed but not peeled, and thickly sliced

salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Melt the butter over gentle heat. Place the cauliflower, stalk side up,  in a pot selected for its tight fit. If there is free space around the cauliflower, place slices of potato around it to fill it up.

Cover the pot tightly and place over low heat. If you see steam escaping, cover the edges of the pot with a strip of tin foil. Cook for 1-1-2 hours.

The flower end of the vegetable will have become a dark brown, or even black. This is good. Sprinkle salt and pepper over it before serving. Enjoy!

Does just looking at pots and pans inspire you to cook?

It happens to me all the time.

Touring wineries with a couple of girlfriends on Passover, a sign on the road caught our attention: ceramicist’s studio. We stepped in. There were shelves full of glazed earthenware pots, casseroles, mugs, platters. How might an earnest cook react to that? Well, I’ll tell you: tempted.

I have a weakness for earthenware. But I restrained myself from buying the store out and brought home only one pot. I’d been searching something to cook beans in. This pot really made me see a delicious bean stew, savory with tomatoes and herbs and baked to perfection.

Does this phenomenon having a name? Pavlovian Pot-Food Vision Syndrome? It’s like looking at a sliced lemon and immediately thinking of…well, gin and tonic, in my case, although others might say lemonade.

Passover past, I inaugurated my new pot with kidney beans. They’re meaty (but vegan) and robust, and floury enough to absorb the flavors of olive oil and aromatics. And so good paired with cornbread, or spooned over rice. I may have PP-FVS, but I like having it.

I bake my beans, but you may cook them on the stove if you prefer.

Spicy Red Bean Stew

Printable version here.

Yield: 5-6 servings

Ingredients:

2 cups checked and rinsed dried kidney beans

4 cups water for soaking

For initial cooking:

1/2 onion

1 bay leaf

1 clove garlic

Dollop olive oil

For later cooking:

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 large onion, chopped

4-6 cloves garlic, chopped finely

1 cup chopped tomatoes

1/2 teaspoon dried thyme

1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1/4 – 1/2  teaspoon cayenne flakes

1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

1 tablespoon soy sauce

6 cups water

salt to taste

Method:

Soak the cleaned, rinsed beans in 4 cups water overnight. Most directions say to drain and rinse them afterwards. I keep them covered with a kitchen towel and cook them with their soaking water and don’t experience digestive upsets. But whatever you choose to do, soak ‘em.

Put the beans in a large pot with water amounting to  6 cups. Add the bay leaf, 1/2 onion, garlic, and olive oil. Cover and bake at 300° F – 150° C. If cooking on the stovetop, bring to a gentle boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer. Place a heat-absorbent pad under the pot and cover.  Either way, cook until the beans are tender -between 1-1/2 to 2 hours.

In a frying pan, heat the olive oil. Add the chopped onions and fry gently till translucent. Add the garlic and tomatoes. Cook over medium heat till the tomatoes have softened. Add all the spices and cook, stirring, for a few minutes, for flavors to blend.

Remove a ladle-full of beans from the pot with some of their liquid, and add to the frying pan. Mash the beans into the vegetables and cook together for 3 or 4 minutes, stirring a few times. Add more cooking liquid if the mass becomes dry.

Return the flavored beans to the pot. Add salt to taste. Cover and bake (or cook) another hour.

Check once in a while to make sure the beans aren’t drying out and add a little water if needed. If well covered and kept from drying out, you can keep the beans cooking for much longer. Personally, I like to cook them 3 or 4 hours after they’re seasoned and ready; they just seem to get better and better.

Serve piping hot.

Notes:

A way to check if beans are tender: remove some, with their liquid, from the pot. Blow on them. If the skins split and separate from the bean easily, they’re cooked through.

You may dispense with the overnight soaking and pre-cooking, and used canned beans, but they will never taste as good.

Passover travels have already receded into memories, but that’s what photos are for – to make those past moments live again. So have a look at some of the things I saw this spring in Israel.

 Tel Aviv

I was startled to discover that the Messiah has arrived. He sat on the ground in front of Shuk HaCarmel, smoking, with a look of specious humility on his face. It must have cost him a bundle to get that poster made up. I guess he figured on making it back from exhilarated people who desire only to give him all their cash.

Next to the Messiah, a lady sang classic Israeli popular songs and invited the crowd to sing along. She had a much better response than the Messiah.

Husband and I took a stroll through the Yemenite Quarter and passed by Julie’s Egyptian restaurant on Yom Tov street. Here’s Julie herself. I’ve eaten there, not on Passover, and found the food good – typical stuffed vegetables, meat soup, majadra. (Here’s my recipe for majadra.)

Jerusalem

A plaza opposite the Damascus Gate. I have not ventured there in years. But I took a round-city tour on the 99 bus (definitely worth while for the tourist, by the way) and took the shot from the double-decker open top.

Folks on Ben-Yehudah Street, downtown. Let it be said: Arabs walk freely in downtown Jerusalem, while Jews who dare visit Arab quarters risk their lives.

The Talmudic Village: Katzrin Park Living Museum

Katzrin was a 4th-century Jewish settlement,  one of 27  ancient villages in the Golan. The Jews depended on olive oil and wine production.

Isn’t the grape-treading station cool, with its mosaic floor? The dangling rope you see on the left shows how the treaders clung to ropes as they stomped on the grapes. The grape juice drained into a couple of caches you can glimpse on the right, where it was collected for making wine.

An earthquake destroyed the village in 749, when it was abandoned. Excavation began 1971 and the village has been undergoing reconstruction since then. It’s a strange sensation to wander through the actual rooms and passages of this ancient Jewish site.

It did strike me how very much smaller people must have been back then, and how little privacy there was. I guess when you have to haul rocks to build a house, you don’t demand a lot of rooms.

The spring that provided fresh water for all purposes still runs.

Entrance to the synagogue.

Having gotten so close to the Golan Winery, we stopped in and did the little tour.

Towers of fermenting wine pointing to the heavens….

… and heavenly wine maturing in oak barrels. Oy, the delicious aroma of wine soaking in wood…I could have just laid down on the floor and gone to sleep with that odor in my head.

Our guide, Yaacov, genially poured us the most delectable ice wine, Golan Heights. It was like drinking the essence of flowers, cold and sweet.

Zichron Yaacov

I visited an old friend in Zichron last week. A bohemian, Mediterranean air pervades the town, and many artists live there. History still lives in beautifully preserved homes, workshops and synagogues of pre-Independence Israel.

A public drinking fountain built by the Rothschild family for thirsty travelers.

I have a special feeling for the Aharonson family museum. This intellectual, wealthy Romanian family lead Nili, the Jewish underground movement against the occupying Ottoman Turks during WW1. Drama, romance, betrayal and suicide still ring poignant notes as you wander through the wooden house with its original artifacts in place.

I know I saw only a little of that windy, hilly town by the sea.

Gardens in Zichron are lovingly tended. Even an old, crumbling wall is just an opportunity to enrich life with colorful flowers.

We poked around the Tishbi winery shop, which serves pastries and coffee as well as delicious wines and wine-based jams.

They sell wine out of this tank at NIS19 per liter, if you bring your own bottles. Sigh… but I hadn’t brought any empty bottles with me from Petach Tikvah.

So I traveled, in my mind, from the 4th century to the present day, over a week and a half. And it took me most of the day to write this post. To telescope time further, it’ll take you about 3 minutes to see the highlights of my experience – but such is life, and such is blogging. Enjoy!

Being without matzah meal, this gefulte fish is gluten-free.

Long ago, I held by the Chassidic custom of no gebroks on Passover – no matzah that’s come into contact with liquids. So there was no matzah brei or any of the myriad Passover foods requiring matzah meal.  I learned to cook gefulte fish without matzah meal in it.

Eventually, I began cooking with gebroks again. But I still prefer matzah-less gefulte fish. It’s light and just right as a first course when there’s an ample menu to follow. And it holds together just fine without matzah meal. The secret’s in the blending. The longer you blend, the fluffier the fish, and the better it will hold together.

As a newly married and poor bride, I’d just about get tennis elbow grating carrots and onions and whipping the fish mix into a state of enlightenment. My grandmother, and her mother before her, made gefulte fish that way – back in Russia 120 years ago. Nowadays, I shlep my food processor forward and just let it whirr.

And you know what? I think my foremothers would have loved a food processor in their kitchens – and electricity and taps with running water. There’s a lot to be grateful for in everyday life, things we take for granted. Should I call this Grateful Fish?

Maybe not. The Little One gets embarrassed enough by the weird things her Mom says. Someday, I hope, she’ll come around to agreeing with me about Things That Matter. On the other hand, she already likes this fish, so there’s hope she’ll cook it too, someday. Meantime, try it. You’ll like it.

Ahead-of-time notes:

1. Try to get a fish head and bones for the stock that the fish will cook in. Those normally discarded pieces give an excellent rich flavor, although it does make an extra step straining them out. If you can’t get a head or bones, proceed without them. The fish will still be delicious.

2. You can halve or double this recipe easily. Just make sure you have a large enough pot. The fish balls swell while cooking. They will loose some volume again when they cool down.

3. The size and shape of the balls will vary according to your personal taste and custom. Some like their gefulte fish round, some like oval patties. Some like ‘em big, some like ‘em small. I rolled mine into balls about the size of an XL egg and this recipe yielded 14.  The same principle applies to how thick you cut the carrots that cook in the stock and which will later decorate the fish. Just cut according to your fancy.

4. Don’t worry if you have to stack the fish balls on top of each other while cooking. They’ll all cook through. You have to be careful when extracting them out of their cooled, gelled stock, though, in order not to cut through any balls under the ones you’re lifting out.

5. The amount of sugar will depend on how sweet you like your fish. I use 1 tablespoon in the stock and 1 in the fish mixture, and the result is very lightly sweet. If you have Polish genes that demand noticeable sweetness, use 2 tablespoons in the stock and another 2 in the fish mix.

6. Fish ground without bones or skin is much superior, although more expensive.

Gefulte Fish

Ingredients for Stock:

head and bones of 1 carp

2 medium carrots, sliced

2 stalks celery, coarsely sliced

1 large onion, thickly sliced

1 teaspoon salt

1 -2 tablespoons sugar

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

1-1/2 liters – 6 cups water

Ingredients for Fish Mix:

500 grams – 1 lb. ground carp

1 large carrot, peeled and cut into chunks

1 large onion, peeled and cut into chunks

1 egg

1 teaspoon salt

1-2 tablespoons sugar

Method:

Place fish head and bones in the bottom of a large pot. Place vegetables on top. Add seasonings. Add water, cover and bring to a boil.

Reduce heat to medium and cook the stock for 1/2 hour. While the stock is cooking, prepare the fish mix:

Blend the carrots, onions and egg in a food processor until very fine and creamy – about 5 minutes. Add the ground fish and seasonings. Whiz again for another 5 minutes or until the mass is very smooth.

Refrigerate the fish mix until you’re ready to make balls and cook them – that is, until the stock is ready. That’ll be when the stock looks and tastes like soup, not just like vegetables in hot water.

(If using fish head and bones, allow the stock to cool and strain out the solid parts, discarding all but the sliced carrots. If no head or bones, leave everything in the pot and proceed as follows.)

Wet your hands and form balls or oval patty shapes. Place each gently into the hot stock. Press a slice of cooked carrot from the stock onto the top of each, if you like. When the stock boils again, lower the heat to minimum and place a flame-tamer (heat mat) under the pot. Cook as gently as possible for 2-12/ hours. Do not cook for less time. The fish cooks through much sooner, but you’ll notice that the aroma becomes richer as time goes on. For best flavor, just let it cook the full 2-1/2 hours.

Allow the gefulte fish to cool to just warm and remove to a serving platter, or, if cooking ahead of time, to a container with a lid. If you like fish jelly, pour some of the stock over the fish. Chill. If you left the balls plain, decorate each one with a carrot slice from the stock before serving.

In Israel, spring has sprung. In the mornings you see a great number of women shlepping wheeled shopping carts on  buses, intent on filling them up at the shuk. I can relate to them. Here’s my shopping cart, rather worse for wear but full of good things: lavender and mint in pots and lotsa garlic. Well, yes, garlic…what else would I go to shuk for, twice in one week?  Fresh green garlic has arrived, and Mimi is one happy blogger. So far I’ve only made 1 batch of garlic confit (recipe here), but there’ll be more.

It’s not too soon to plan Passover menus. Here’s an updated roundup of recipes that suit the holiday. Enjoy!

Meat

Boeuf Bourgignon

Moroccan Beef Tajine – just leave the chickpeas out and it’ll be delicious all the same.

Klops – Jewish Meatballs

Lamb Osso Bucco

Meatballs with Swiss Chard

Poultry

Chicken Sofrito

Chicken Roasted on a Bed of Onions

Chicken Thighs in an Almond Crust Substitute matzah meal for the breadcrumbs.

Garlic Chicken or Turkey Bites

Fish

Red Mullet in Chermoulah Sauce

Salmon with Preserved Lemons and Garlic

Trout Baked with Pickled Lemons Didn’t preserve any lemons? Never mind – use fresh ones.

Fish Fillets in a Walnut Crust

Moroccan Shabbat Fish Stew

Fish Fillets Baked With Tomatoes and Herbs

Salmon with Orange Glaze

Vegetables

Jerusalem Artichokes and Mushrooms

Pan-Roasted Cauliflower and Broccoli

Grilled Vegetable Kabobs

Glazed Turnips

Ratatouille

Buttered Black Radishes

Tajine of Sweet Potatoes, Carrots and Prunes

Onions Roasted with Olive Oil and Herbs

Moroccan Carrot Salad

Swiss Chard and Potato Rollups

Potatoes and Sweet Potatoes

Potatoes with Olives

Gnocchi

Sweet Potatoes Roasted in Date Syrup

Mafroum – Tunisian Meat-Stuffed Potatoes  Substitute fine matzah meal for the flour.

Sweet Potato Salad

Golden Herbed Potato Wedges

Soup

Green Soup with Chicken Dumplings

Jerusalem Artichoke Soup and Tomato/Mint Soup

Miscellaneous Goodies

Mayonnaise and Aioli in 5 Minutes

6 Ways to Use Up Leftover Wine

Shmaltz and Matzah Balls

Kugel Tart Crust

Strawberries and Cream

Almond-Lemon Macaroons

Does it have to do with so-called Senior Moments? I’m not sure I subscribe to that.

Maybe these cooking lapses happen occasionally to people who have all the responsibility for daily meals. Any chef I’ve asked says that when he’s home, his wife cooks dinner – or that he eats out after work, or gratefully puts his feet under his mother-in-law’s table.

Which cheered me up some. Here I am, along with the culinary big shots, suffering from Food Thinking Overload.

So I let someone else do the thinking for me. Strolling over to the kitchen cabinet where my cookbooks live, I  pulled out Claudia Rodin’s encyclopedic Book of Jewish Food. Leafing through the pages, I considered chicken with quinces and chicken with dates. Then this tempting, easy-looking recipe caught my eye: Sofrito.

As a Latin American, I identify sofrito as a mix of chopped onions, garlic and tomatoes, sometimes with bell peppers, all seasoned with cumin and ground coriander and fried in olive oil. It’s a flavor base for beans and many other dishes. But here the word is applied to a method that falls between frying and stewing. According to Ms. Rodin, “…cooking slowly in a mixture of oil and very little water….results in a taste and feel quite different from those of a stew.”

The seasonings, a  pungent/sharp mixture, were subtly and characteristically Sephardic. In fact, my mouth began to water, just standing there reading the recipe. So I made it, and here it is, just as good as I imagined. And easy, easy, easy.

Chicken Sofrito

Adapted from Claudia Rodin’s Book of Jewish Food

3-4 servings. Can be doubled or tripled.

Ingredients:

2 halves of chicken breast

1 chicken thigh

2 tablespoons olive oil

Juice of 1/2 lemon

2 crushed garlic cloves

Saffron, a good pinch

1/2 teaspoon grated galingale root or ginger

salt and white pepper

1 cup water

Put the water and all the seasonings in a large pot. Bring to a boil.

Add the chicken pieces.

Cover the pot and cook the chicken in the water mixture over the lowest heat. Turn it over once in a while to cook evenly.

When the chicken is tender – between 1 and 1-1/2 hours, remove it from the pot to a platter. Taste the sauce in the pot for seasoning and adjust if needed. Raise the heat and reduce the sauce until it’s thickened to your liking.

Spoon the sauce over the chicken and serve with roasted baby potatoes and greens. Or do the traditional thing and serve your sofrito with plain white rice.

Note: to double the recipe, cook one chicken, quartered. Double seasonings but add only 1/2 cup more water.

Readers who have followed this blog know I have a thing about garlic. Some of my favorite, garlic-fragrant recipes are aioli sauce,  garlicky crisp-skinned potatoes, and spicy eggplant in garlic sauce.

The garlic I bought last year has gone all sprouty. The new crop will be in the shuk any day now, but meantime the sprouted stuff is still good to eat. It just takes a little more patience and knife work.

You have to peel away the tough yellowish membrane that encloses the sprouted germ.

Pare away anything that looks rotten. Chop it up and use it. It tastes like…garlic, the same as ever.

Do you love hamentaschen? I’m betting you do.

I sure do, but I’m not at all fond of the over-sweet, stodgy hamentaschen flooding grocery stores and supermarkets right now. It’s so worthwhile making my own, that I’m going to interrupt my pre-Purim baking marathon to post this recipe. It’s a real, old-fashioned hamentasch with a delicate cookie crust. The filling is up to you. I’ve kept it pareve to accommodate those eating meat meals on Purim day. But I must say that these hamentaschen are fabulous filled with dulce de leche.

Old-Fashioned Hamentaschen

Source: Jewish Cookery, by Leah W. Leonard

Yield: about 24 hamentaschen

Preheat oven to 375° F – 190° C.

Ingredients for Dough:

2/3 cup margarine

1/2 cup sugar

1 egg, beaten

3 tablespoons water

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

2 cups sifted flour

Method:

Blend margarine and sugar. Add egg and mix to creaminess.

Add water and vanilla. Stir in flour till you obtain a dough you can gather into a ball.

Place dough ball in a plastic bag, close it well, and chill 2 hours to overnight.

Roll out on a floured surface till the dough is 1/8″ thin. It’s convenient to cut the dough up into quarters or halves and work with those smaller amounts.

Cut into rounds. The size of your cookie will depend on the size of the rounds, of course. With a biscuit cutter, I made 24 hamentaschen.

Place a level teaspoon of filling in the center of each cookie round. Mrs. Leonard’s instructions are that the filling should be “the size of a hazelnut,” referring to fruit and nut fillings.

Pinch the sides of each filled cookie together to form a triangle that shows the filling in the center.

Place on baking-paper lined sheet and bake about 12 minutes or until lightly browned. Remove to a rack to cool.

Filling: Any firm jam or preserves. I used a sugar-free apricot jam in this batch. But here’s another very old-fashioned European filling, also from Jewish Cookery.

Poppyseed Filling

2 cups ground poppyseeds

1 cup water

1/2 cup honey

1/4 cup sugar

1/8 teaspoon salt

2 eggs.

Combine seeds, water, honey, sugar and salt in a saucepan. Cook over medium heat till thick, stirring to avoid scorching. Allow to cool before adding eggs. Beat thoroughly and if the added eggs thin the filling out, return the pan to heat and cook, stirring, 1-2 minutes longer.

Notes:

Avoid watery fillings as these will force the cookie open and spill.

Plan to bake these cookies as soon as they’re filled and shaped into hamentaschen. If held over too long, their walls will collapse in the oven. As I found out when photographing them before baking.

The chilling period is necessary to create the firm yet delicate consistency of the cookie. Don’t neglect it.

These hamentaschen are just special. Enjoy, and Purim Sameach!

There were Jerusalem artichokes in the shuk this week, looking so pretty in their light pink and brown jackets that I had to cram a few into my overloaded shopping bag. You can see what my local shuk looks like here and here.

Then I wandered over to the big herb stand, the one that has the biggest, most varied mushroom display, and bought a little basket of button mushrooms. Once home, it seemed natural to cook the chokes and mushrooms together. I’m glad I did. The earthy mushrooms complemented the choke’s slight sweetness, and all was made piquant with onions and spices. It was really tasty, and a hit with my vegetarian friend who was lunching with me that day. I’ll do it again.

Something about these knobbly roots reminds me of dragons, or prehistoric lizards.  Doesn’t this one remind you of a crouching dragon patiently waiting to pounce on some unsuspecting knight?

But I was about to take my knife to this unsuspecting Jerusalem artichoke.

The first thing to do with these chokes is peel them. The trick is to slice off the protruding knobs first, peeling them separately later. Makes peeling the body of the choke much easier. Then, gentle reader, follow the following recipe:

Jerusalem Artichokes and Mushrooms

serves 4

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons olive oil

3 Jerusalem artichoke tubers, each about 4″ – 10 cm. long

1 medium onion, chopped

1-1/2 cups halved button mushrooms

2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced

1/8 teaspoon rubbed sage, or 1 small dried leaf, crumbled

1/4 teaspoon dried thyme leaves

salt and pepper

3 scallions, sliced

Method:

Peel the chokes and chop into slices 1/2″ – 1 cm. thick.

Heat the oil in a large skillet. Sauté the onions in the oil till translucent. Add the choke slices. Spread them out so that most of them are in contact with the hot oil. Cook over medium heat, allowing one side of the chokes to brown. This should take about 5 minutes.

Turn the slices over and brown the top sides. Now cover with a pot lid, lower the heat, and let the chokes steam in their own slight juices – about 10 minutes. Stir to prevent scorching if needed.

Add the mushrooms, spreading them out over the chokes but not mixing them in. Raise the heat to medium. Salt lightly and cover again.  The mushrooms will release juice and help cook the chokes. Cook like this 5 minutes.

Continue cooking over medium heat, covered. Keep an eye on it and stir a few times to prevent scorching. The choke slices should be cooked through and tender, but not mushy, when you go on to the next step – about another 5 minutes.

Sprinkle the sage, thyme, and salt and pepper to taste over all. Stir. Taste and adjust seasoning. Cook, covered, a few minutes or until you’re satisfied that the seasonings have penetrated throughout the dish.

Scatter finely chopped scallions over all and serve.

But I love hot cereal. Especially on a cold, windy, rainy morning, when Husband and the Little One are already out of the house and my only date is with the computer. (Ah, that romance with a robot). If I’ve been efficient and started my oatmeal early on – while bleary-eyed, I was putting together the Little One’s sandwiches and boiling water for Husband’s tea – I can  then sit down peacefully with the bowl of soothing, satisfying oatmeal, all by myself.

But it has to be creamy almost to smoothness. Aromatic with cinnamon.  With a few pieces of chopped date or some raisins for contrast. Just off-sweet is how I like it, although most folks like it sweeter. It takes very little work, but some time.

The World’s Creamiest Oatmeal

Serves 2-3

Ingredients:

1 cup rolled oats (not instant)

3 cups boiling water

Pinch salt

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 cup milk

Sweeter to taste

Drizzle of honey

1 chopped date or 2 teaspoons raisins

Drop the pinch of salt into the boiling water. Stir the oats in, little by little. Too much at a time and you’ll get doughy lumps.When all the oats are absorbed and the mass starts to boil, lower the heat so that it’s just simmering. Cover the pot and continue cooking on lowest heat.

Stir once in a while to keep the oatmeal from sticking to the bottom. Keep cooking, 20 minutes.

When it’s all cooked through and mushy, add the milk, sugar or sweetener to taste, and cinnamon. Cook, always stirring and always on low heat, till all is absorbed again. This should take another 10 minutes.

The oatmeal should be creamy and heavy in the spoon. Then it’s ready.

Ladle into bowls and top with the dried fruit. Drizzle a little honey over it all if liked.

Now dip your spoon in and savor your oatmeal. How gratifying.