…Cooking steel-cut oats in the rice cooker, plugged into a timer, so it would come on and start cooking an hour before I planned to get up.
Verdict: 5 servings of perfectly cooked oats, 1 serving of perfectly-gunked-up rice cooker. The oats foamed up and plugged the vent. I think I can clean it out, but I won't be sure until the next time I cook rice.
My rice cooker is a sturdy, restaurant-quality one that wasn't cheap, and its fancy gasketed lid is going to have to come apart to be cleaned now; perhaps, if I want to make a habit of this (and I do — the oatmeal was fantastic, much better than when I tried to make it overnight in the crock-pot) I should get a cheap rice cooker with a simple lid, and dedicate it to steel cut oats.
Mmm, steel cut oats. Normally we make oatmeal from rolled oats in the microwave. I don't eat them much. And then while we were at Camp du Nord last month, they served steel cut oats and … yum. I had forgotten how good they are. And now that I am no longer eating low carb, well, they can return to my diet in quantity! Yay! The only barrier: I am the one who wants them, I am the one who gets up first, and I am a "get up and eat breakfast right away" person, not a "get up and wait an hour for the oats to cook" person. By the time steel cut oats are done, I would already have given up and had bacon and eggs. Hence the cook-while-you-sleep experiments.
