Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Serendipity in the Kitchen – Chai Flavored Oatmeal

Serendipity in the Kitchen
Chai Flavored Oatmeal

Most of my cooking mistakes result in culinary disasters. Like the time I poured cold popover batter into a hot glass baking pan and watched it instantly crack and break into pieces. Or when I cooked a ham with some plastic accidentally left on it. A recent kitchen accident however, led to a wonderful success.

I enjoy oatmeal for breakfast and have several favorite ways to prepare it. On frosty weekend mornings I often toast the raw oats to bring out their nuttiness and then steam them until fluffy and tender. But weekdays, when I’m in a hurry, I usually use the microwave. To embellish this simple hot cereal I sweeten and flavor it with DaVinci Gourmet flavored syrups. These syrups are most often used to flavor coffee, sodas, etc. but I use it in all sorts of ways in the kitchen. My kitchen typically has about a dozen different flavors on hand at any one time.

For flavoring oatmeal I usually use caramel, French vanilla, or Irish Cream flavors. One morning, in hurry and a bit distracted, I grabbed the bottle of Irish Cream syrup to add to my hot oatmeal. As soon as the first drops of liquid fell from the mouth of the bottle into my bowl I realized I had the wrong bottle. I had poured DaVinci’s Spiced Chai Tea concentrate into my breakfast!

I had purchased the concentrate for making Chai tea and decided that I didn’t really care for the tea it made. In my oatmeal it smelled pretty good, and it was too late to make another bowl. I stirred in some milk and tasted it. It was delicious!

Chai contains many intense spices like cloves, cardamom, pepper, cinnamon, and ginger. These flavors go well with the creamy nuttiness of hot oatmeal. The Chai tea concentrate really perked up my plain bowl of oatmeal. I highly recommend it!

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a scent is worth a million. A photograph of a bowl of oatmeal can never be more than, well, a photograph of a bowl of oatmeal. Even a professional food photographer with thousands of dollars of fancy equipment could not create an enticing image of oatmeal. If only I could capture the fragrance of this Chai flavored oatmeal and post it here! But all I can give you are my words and this simple photograph and hope they encourage you to try this.

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