Tim's Oats

2024 was the year I gave in and became what I said I never would: an eat-oatmeal-every-morning sicko. The grimmest fate, I’d always thought: sitting in your kitchen, in the half-light of morning, yet again shoveling into your mouth spoonful after spoonful of gloppy, congealed gray oats. I bristled at the way our culture pushed oatmeal as a just-this-side-of-Soylent method of ingesting calories and fiber before a productivity-optimized day, less a meal than a life-hack. 

And now look at me. I eat oats for breakfast at least five days a week. And I love them. 

So let me, with the zeal of the convert, share how I learned to stop worrying and love the oat. It all starts with a simple recipe.

The day I learn the recipe: 2010, springtime, a bright Saturday morning. There I was, a college sophomore standing in the mostly-clean commercial kitchen of the co-op I had recently moved into. I had a big block of cheddar cheese and was getting ready to fix myself some eggs for breakfast when I smelled something burning and looked up. The only other person in the kitchen was my housemate Tim. He stood in front of the gas range, stirring a pot with a wooden spoon, the burner on high. Inside the pot, I noticed, were rolled oats—but no water. And it wasn’t quite a burning smell. It was more bewitching, somewhere between sweet caramel and woodsmoke, like bread when it’s almost done baking.

I asked Tim what he was doing. He said, Oh, I like to toast my oats before making oatmeal.

The secret, right there! 

Tim was a senior, I was a sophomore, and in that era of life I felt the gradations of social standing so acutely that I figured it was basically impossible that we could be friends. Nonetheless—or perhaps because of this—I found myself crushing on him. He was handsome in a nerdy science student kind of way: short-cropped hair, flannel shirts, freckles. He was friendly but aloof. And he was a good cook.

My partner has a koan, There’s nothing sexier than competence. Tim’s aura of control and capability exemplified this. I kept my distance while also paying close attention. When he let slip the key to excellent oatmeal, I was there to catch it.

The next semester, Tim had graduated, so I was free to try my own hand at toasted oatmeal, there was no chance of being caught cooking his dish.

What can I say: it was good! The toasting brought out a nuttiness and sweetness that I had never tasted before in oatmeal. And it wasn’t like this method added a lot of cooking time; the oats actually seemed to cook faster after being toasted. This immediately became my go-to way of cooking oatmeal. When, fifteen years later, the exigency of feeding a toddler every morning before preschool turned me into an oatmeal-every-morning sicko, this recipe was here to make the oats not just palatable but delicious.

FRESH-TOASTED OATMEAL PORRIDGE

(serves 2-4)

INGREDIENTS

2 cups rolled oats (not pre-cooked)
1/2 tsp salt
3 cups water

STEPS

1. Toast the oats in a dry pot over a high flame for 4-6 minutes. Toss the oats or stir them with a wooden spoon every thirty seconds or so, until the last minute or so, when you should stir/toss them constantly, as the oats have come up to temperature and are caramelizing and will burn if unstirred.

2. Once the oats are toasted enough (you may have to experiment to determine how dark you like them), but certainly before they begin to burn, add the water and salt. Half-cover with an askew lid. 

3. Bring to a boil. (Pay attention that the pot doesn’t boil over.) Once it boils, reduce to a low simmer and cover completely. Stir occasionally. At this point you may want to start toasting some pecans or other nuts to top the oatmeal with.

4. Once the water has boiled off enough that none pools against the bottom of the pot when you stir the oats, turn the heat off and cover the pot. (For me this usually takes 5-7 minutes.) 

5. After a minute or two, the oats are ready to serve. 

I like to top my porridge bowl with about a tablespoon of heavy whipping cream, a scattering of raisins, and some toasted pecans. (I broil them on a baking sheet in my toaster oven for 4 minutes.) Other great toppings: chunky apple sauce, berry jam, cut-up apples, fresh mango, butter, yogurt, milk, compote, blueberries, brown sugar, maple syrup. My partner sometimes puts peanut butter in her oatmeal. It’s breakfast—anything goes.

This week’s good things: making bread again, fresh bread crackling, LA in the rain, and a squeaky cabinet door.

I started this podcast in part to force myself to be more confident in front of the microphone. For the last four years I’ve been hosting the Seed Field Podcast, where I interview academics from around Antioch University about their areas of expertise and how they intersect with social justice. Despite having put out over 80 episodes of that show, I still sometimes struggle to express my thoughts fluently and fluidly. I often lapse into long pauses and ums and uhs and restatements that later have to be edited out. So my rule with YKWG is that I only record one take, there’s no editing (except to adjust levels), and I always publish that take. Essentially, when I hit record, I’m live on air. It’s exciting and a bit nerve-wracking—and it forces me to just keep on going. Hopefully it makes for interesting tape, too.

Did you know that mussels reproduce via broadcast spawning? That on one lucky day, all the mussels just send their eggs and sperm out into the world? I have been thinking about this video on at least a weekly basis ever since I saw it:

In high school some of my friends became obsessed with banana slug sex (look up at your own peril). I never really got into it, though. But then I found out about mussel spawning, and now I’m obsessed. It makes me want to take up a daily tidepooling practice, just so I could be there on the wild day when this happens.

My dear friend Abraham Cohen has been pursuing music as his primary art form for at least as long as I’ve been pursuing writing. They have cultivated a fantastic talent. Yet till now, he’s never recorded an album or EP or anything. That’s hopefully going to change, this May. Abraham’s band Queer Country has studio time lined up with Oz Fritz (producer of Tom Waits’s Alice and Mule Variations, among many, many others), and they’re intending to professionally cut at least four tracks.

Right now Queer Country is running an online fundraiser for the many costs that will go into this endeavor. If you can spare some money, I think it’s a worthy project to support. Donate here.

(Also check out this cool bios page on the Queer Country website (which I host!))

I had two reminders in my Notes app for topics to write about: “Our mail carrier giving Orlando and us oranges” and “Lisa’s newsletter.” But then I read the latest installment of Not Know How and saw that Lisa had herself written a beautiful meditation on walking around our neighborhood, worrying about the state of the world, and, would you know it, receiving unexpected gift oranges:

You should read the full essay. Plus, after the essay there’s an interview with noted graveyard writer Jessica Ferri. And a plug for You Know What’s Good, which she described as a “delicious, ASMR-adjacent vignette series.” (!!!) I may be biased, but I find Not Knowing How to always be full of beautiful insights and literary genius.

If you’re in LA, you really should go see “The Spiral Universe,” a solo show of artworks by Madam X that just opened at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz. (It closes April 19.) The show has many intricate, mandala-like paintings, textiles, and sculptures by this visionary outsider artist, who spent decades in near-total obscurity until last year’s “Circumnavigating the Sphere of Time” at Space Ten Gallery (a show organized by friend-of-Lightplay Axel Wilhite). That initial show resulted in a beautiful catalog, which I’m delighted to have a copy of. This latest show, which runs through April 19, lacks a catalog, but it has its own magic, partly stemming from the setting. Madam X’s alternately metaphysical and satirical works are presented in the occult complex of the Philosophical Research Society, a strange space built by the prolific magical-tract-writer Manly P. Hall. I plan to eventually write more about Madam X’s work in this space (here’s a blog post I wrote after her previous show went up). For now I heartily recommend seizing the chance to see her work in person. 

New poem about AI just dropped: “For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper” by Joseph Fasano. Some relevant lines:

This question also goes out to people using AI to generate “content” that ends up getting published alongside words by humans! (I found this on kottke.org.)

I’ve avoided politics this far into this week’s Lightplay, but these days being what they are, I can’t make it any further. This week I’m finding the extrajudicial abduction of American permanent resident and father-to-be Mahmoud Kahlil to be a very bad sign of where things are going.

It’s also the week when California’s governor, the Democrat Gavin Newsom, decided to soft-launch his 2024 presidential campaign by starting a new podcast and using the first episode to identify the true threat to American freedom: underage trans girls competing in sports. I just want to register how sick this makes me feel. As you’re reading this, roughly 50% of trans and nonbinary teens have “seriously considered attempting suicide” in the last year. Meanwhile here’s one of the most powerful people in the country, a cis-man, and he’s going to use his platform to amplify some invented panic about a high school triple jumper. What a creep. What an evil cretin.

Beyond indignation, I do have one insight to offer here: remember November when there was a minor obsession among liberals with finding “the liberal Joe Rogan”? The timing is too obvious for this not to be true—Newsom thinks that that’s him. He’ll be the one to do it. By selling out trans people. What a loser.

Now, for something completely different! The NBA season is winding towards the playoffs, and my Warriors are on a six-game win streak. They traded for Jimmy Butler a month ago, and the vibes, as they say, are good.

Despite this, most people still think that last year’s champs, the Boston Celtics, are a better team. Maybe they are. But they play a style of basketball on offense that I find deeply unpleasant—almost the inverse of the joyous improvisation of the Warriors. So I was so delighted by this sick burn from the writer John Saward:

The rest of the piece, about the surging Detroit Pistons and the idea of “momentum” in sports, is also excellent. (I’ve been really enjoying my subscription to Flaming Hydra, the daily newsletter it was published in.)

POV: You’re a millennial. You’re never going to be able to afford a house. So why not put a whole avocado on a slice of toast, top it with lemon juice and olive oil and salt and pepper, and call it lunch?