January is National Oatmeal Month

By Robin Hoselton

This morning as I ate my oatmeal, while feeling so virtuous for lowering my cholesterol, I remembered January is National Oatmeal Month.  Today, the breakfast of millions of Americans will consist of  oatmeal, causing this month to rack up the highest volume of sales for the year.

Thanks to the Quaker company site, I learned that I can buy extra oatmeal when it is on sale, because even with limited cupboard space, I can freeze the oats in an airtight container or bag. And, they won’t need thawing when I’m ready to use them.

The toppings for this healthy grain are as diverse as the people who eat it; i.e. honey, cinnamon, butter, chocolate chips, apple juice, eggnog, raisins, bananas, brown sugar, raspberry yogurt, cherry preserves, pumpkin butter, ad infinitum.

Even people who don’t like oatmeal as a cereal usually keep it in their pantries to bake cookies, granola and bread, or to use as a coating for baked chicken, as a filler for meatloaf, to thicken chili, to toast oats for a salad topping, to relieve itchy skin with an oatmeal bath, to make a homemade oatmeal facial, and to make clay for a child by mixing with water and flour.

With so many people using oatmeal for so many things, I wondered what they’re doing with all those cylindrical tubes? I dressed for a trip to the library to find out.  Translation: I put on my slippers and sat down at the computer to check Google.

The recycling of all those packages rekindled my faith in humanity.  Here’s a sampling of how those empty boxes are given a new life: As hideouts for hamsters, guinea pigs, gerbils, rats and caged birds,  freezer containers for cookies, yarn holders, doll cradles, train engines, plastic bag holders, pretend mailboxes, wrapped packages holding flower vases, Halloween witches,  cardboard-tube “critters,” miniature rocking horses, part of space shuttle costumes, tambourines (dried peas inside a cut down box), electromagnetic cranes for science fair projects,  pinhole cameras, part of 12-volt corded spotlights, and unusual handbags.
Now that I’ve finished eating my daily oatmeal, I’ll exchange my slippers for my gardening clogs.  Turns out that I can make a plant pillar simply by putting chicken wire inside my empty oatmeal tube and pouring in cement.  Mr. Quaker would be so proud!

 

P.S. A useless bit of trivia which I’ll unwillingly hang onto for the rest of my life is that an 18-ounce package of Old Fashioned Quaker® Oats contains about 26,000 rolled oats.  Now who the devil has so much time that he/she counted them?