The word ‘oatmeal’ technically just refers to dried oats – be they steel-cut, rolled or quick – or a porridge made thereof. Long habit and family tradition, though, conjure up a whole dish for me: oats cooked soft, mixed with raisins and milk and generously sprinkled with brown sugar – you know you’ve got enough when pools of brown syrup form on the surface of the bowl. Martha’s influence has caused me to introduce the occasional nut (married life, sigh). But for the most part I’m eating the same oatmeal my mom made me when I was three.

And that’s fine – actually kind of touching if I may say – except those pools of melted brown sugar make for a very sweet breakfast, and I’m not really one for the sweets. This makes oatmeal only an occasional day-starter in our household, which is a shame, because a bowl full of whole grains isn’t a bad breakfast.

Liberation from tradition came from an unexpected place: the current month’s issue of Real Simple. Among their recipes was a two-page spread: ’10 ideas for: oatmeal.’ My eye immediately jumped to a bowl of oatmeal topped with scallions, paprika and cheddar cheese. (Cheese on oatmeal? It’s the American way.) Savory oatmeal! Why hadn’t I thought of this before?

I made the cheese-scallion oatmeal a few days after this revelation. I followed the Cook’s Illustrated technique for steel-cut oats, slightly modified: for two people, boil 2 cups of water, turn off the heat and stir in 1/2 cup of steel-cut oats. Soak overnight. In the morning, add a little more water, bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium and cook for 6 minutes. Then cover and let rest 5 minutes before serving. I topped each bowl with a handful of mild white cheddar, a sprinkle of paprika and thinly-sliced scallions.

Real Simple also suggests topping oatmeal with salsa, slice avocado and a fried egg – I’ll take any excuse to add more avocado to my diet. But this is just the tip of the iceberg: ginger-scallion sauce, barbecued pork belly, sausage gravy, the possibilities abound.

Behold. The kitchen peg board.

I’ve been interested in mounting a peg board in the kitchen for a while (my Reader archive, soon to go up in smoke, tells me I started bookmarking them in 2009). As with most projects, my motivation came from a problem I was aiming to solve. We have only 3 drawers in our kitchen: 1 for silverware, 1 for towels, and 1 for gadgets ranging from apple corers to zesters and every letter in between. Beyond the drawers, we employ two crocks (1 for wooden spoons and the other for whisks, spatulae, and serving implements), one GRUNDTAL rail, and a knife magnet for the sharps.

The drawers were getting full and the crocks were crowded. A solution came in the form of an abandoned peg board stranded at the back door where I work. All it needed was a bright coat of paint.

Paint choices were many. Green won out.

Something that I re-learned from this process is what a difference drying time makes for paint. When you open the can, don’t freak out. When those first strokes go up (or down as in this case), don’t freak out. Keep going. Now wait for it to dry. See? Everything’s going to be fine.

If you’re curious about how to mount a peg board, there are plenty of good to excellent tutorials floating around the web. Wanting to keep the project as close to free as possible, I used garden stakes with the points trimmed off (a brilliantly simple idea from my father) for the frame and painted them white to match the wall color. In the end, the project came in at under $20 including the stakes, paint, and hooks, which accounted for about half of that. And yes, I use very cheap paint.

Sometimes I wonder if the peg board adds too much visual clutter to the kitchen when I look back at pictures taken before it went up, but the convenience of having all of these bits and bobs so easily at hand outweighs my worries.

One year in, and I’m still walking. Sometimes I even bring my “real” camera along. I’m starting a new photography class next month and I’m excited to learn more, this time with a borrowed digital SLR… a real real camera. Wish me luck!

Ingredients

• 3 pounds apples, quartered
• Honey or sugar (optional)
• Lemon juice (optional)
• 1/2 teaspoon of your favorite spice: cinnamon, cardamom, allspice, cloves (optional)

Now, to begin.

Step 1: Get thee to the Kingfield Farmers Market/Fulton Farmers Market Holiday Market… Market Market Market this Sunday and grab a peck of apples. These beautiful Ruby Jons originated there this time last year. I waited too long to eat them because they were just that pretty. They were more than apples. They were plum like. Jewels! As Deborah Madison reminds us, almost any apple will make a good applesauce whether fresh or past its prime:

Fresh fall apples are great, but don’t overlook those older ones whose texture is no longer good for eating out of hand. And include some red skins–they tint the sauce pink.
–Deborah Madison, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

Step 2: Madison says a pressure cooker will get you send you from 0 to applesauce in under 15 minutes, but if you don’t have one you can start by putting the apples in a pot with about a 1/3 cup of water and cooking them on the stovetop for 20 minutes.

Step 3: Enter my great-grandmother’s sieve. Not exactly a modern-day food mill… but it does the job, however inefficiently, and looks good doing it, too.

LOOK AT THOSE CURVES.

With a clean pot underneath, in went the cooked apples and out came applesauce without need for any added flavors. No honey, no sugar, no lemon juice. Just perfect pink applesauce. I left out the spices as well to keep my options open. That’s the beauty of applesauce. Is it breakfast? Dessert? Pork chop-topping? It’s all of the above.

This recipe makes about 1 quart.

Minneapolis’ first, real snow has arrived.