Oatmeal is good for you!

It's full of soluble and unsoluble fiber and many nutrients. It helps prevent heart disease and cancer and regulates digestion for diabetics. It promotes regularity. It also helps stave off hunger until lunch and costs next to nothing per serving.

That's all fine but here are the downsides. It tastes bad plain - like eating paste. It also can cause flatulence for some, especially when combined with milk. Now let's look at how to doctor it up so it will taste better, and find out what's wrong with individual fruity packets of oatmeal from the store.

Great Value 42 oz (15 dry cups) round box of rolled oats: $2.24 ($0.05 / oz), 30 servings at 7.5 cents per serving
Ingredients - 100% natural rolled oats. It doesn't get any more natural that that.

Note: Quick Oats are just ground up whole oats. They cost the same but cook in two minutes, not four. Use rolled whole oats in cookies and granola. If you run out of quick oats, just run some whole oats through the blender.

Classic additions to add to improve the taste: Cinnamon, apple chunks, raisins, sugar, brown sugar, honey, artificial sweetener, margarine, salt, milk, walnuts, almonds, sunflower seeds

Possible other ingredients I've not tried: Orange juice, lemon juice, coffee, almond extract, flavored yogurt, bananas, blueberries, strawberries

My favorite Additions:
Great Value 24 oz can of Raisins ($2.68) - 1 oz in oatmeal = $0.11 per serving
Great Value 2.37 oz Cinnamon ($2.12) - get 30 servings from bottle = $0.07 per serving
Great Value Sucralose sweetener 200 pack ($4.98) - 2 pack serving = $0.05 per serving
Great Value Cane Sugar - no price check but I know it is 1/3 cost of Sucralose, 1/2 of Aspartame, so $0.02 per serving

We just added $0.23 to out $0.075 oatmeal to make it taste good for $0.31 / serving total. I just did a blog on oatmeal cookies and you could eat four homemade oatmeal raisin cookies for that price. We've basically traded sugar and margarine for more oatmeal ingredients, for the sake of a good breakfast.

REALITY CHECK:
Life Cereal, 21 oz is $3.38 or $0.16 / oz - a breakfast serving of 4 oz is $0.64 and 8 oz of skim milk on same is another $0.20 which is $0.84 per serving total.  OK I feel better. We're almost 1/3 the cost with our doctored up oatmeal.

Granola was a 1970's invention to make oatmeal more palatable. Basically, you add nuts and raisins and roll things around in honey to glob it up and then bake it on cookie sheets in the oven. Later, after hippies went extinct, it mutated into chocolate covered granola bars with M and M's in them. I still like granola for a snack but it's gone out of vogue and there are only a few brands left such as:

Quaker 28 oz Granola with raisins on sale at Safeway $3.99 or $0.14 / oz
Sunbelt 16 oz Granola with banana chips at Walmart $2.50 or $0.16 / oz


Granola is as cheap as Life cereal. Surprising, isn't it? Someone has to pay for Mikey's salary.


What about those individual oatmeal packets? We've been eating those here for a year and when I switched to regular oatmeal and added raisins and sweeteners, I could not get the good taste back. We switched back for one meal so I could study the ingredients.

Great Value Fruit and Cream Instant Oatmeal Variety Pack, 10 packets, 12.3 oz total - $1.68 total or $0.17 / pack or $0.51 / serving
It comes in Strawberry, Blueberry, Peach and Banana flavors and they do call it artificially flavored. It turns out they use apple pieces for texture for the strawberry and peach versions and dried figs for the blueberries for texture. That's not the real problem. Why does it taste good? LOTS of sugar, 12 grams per packet. We like three packets per person which is exactly the same sugar content as a can of Sprite.
Say, a can of Sprite would go good with those four homemade cookies for breakfast, wouldn't it?

The food industry has two proven rules:
1. If it doesn't taste good enough then add more sugar. (works on catsup, canned corn, you name it)
2. If it doesn't taste good enough then add more salt. (storebought frozen entrees, all fast food entrees)

The medical industry has two proven rules:
1. Eating lots of sugar leads to weight gains (then diabetes).
2. Eating lots of salt leads to high blood pressure (then heart attacks).

CONCLUSION:
Monitor carefully the cost of items that you add to your homemade oatmeal. Raw ingredients like oatmeal, potatoes and rice are really cheap but the cost of making them taste good cost much more. If you're turning to the dark side (mo' sugar, please!), at least eat your own oatmeal raisin cookies for breakfast.