4 am Crumb Cake Oatmeal

Just two emergency shifts into my rotation, my idealistic USMLE study schedule has been cast aside, to be replaced with lots of sleep...excessive amounts of sleep, really (case in point: I woke up at 1:30 pm today...after sleeping for 11 hours!). I don't know how I found the discipline in clerkship to both work and study. These days when I get home from the hospital all I want to do is curl up on the couch!

where I've been spending too much time recently

Work in the emergency department has been going well. It's lots of fun and so busy that an 8- or 9-hour shift flies by. Having the roads to myself on the drives home has been amazing! When I get home in the early hours of the morning it's a toss up between eating and going straight to bed. Although on day shifts I find I'm starving if lunch is delayed by even an hour, during the evening and night I can miraculously go ten or fifteen hours without thinking about food.

where I've spent the last couple evenings

When I got home at 3:45 am on Monday night I was hungry enough to make myself a bowl of my (now staple) peanut butter cookie dough oats. Just having come in from a cold snowy drive, warm oats sounded better than cold, so I popped them in the microwave for a minute. The result was delicious! The oat and flour mixture "baked" a little bit and absorbed the water, creating a very moist, crumbly, coffee cake texture. It was essentially an eggless, simplified (if that's possible!) microwaved mug cake. Five hours later, I woke up looking forward to making another for breakfast! Here's the recipe:

• 1/2 cup oatmeal (ground into oat flour in the blender)
• 1 heaping tsp flour
• cinnamon
• 1 heaping tsp peanut butter
• water

In a microwavable bowl, mix the ground oatmeal, flour, and cinnamon. Add the peanut butter and a bit of water.

Stir everything together, adding more water as necessary (it's hard to stir in the peanut butter by itself, so I always add water before attempting any stirring). As the mixture will dry somewhat in the microwave, I use more water for these than I do for my usual (non-microwaved) cookie dough oats.

Microwave for approximately 1 minute, until the oatmeal is cakey, rather than gooey, and enjoy!

I can't wait to try different versions of these oatmeal crumb cakes in the mornings to come. I think a "blueberry muffin" one would be delicious! I'm happy that I've figured out how to have cake for breakfast with the same ingredients (and protein and fibre benefits) of my regular oatmeal (which I also know keeps me full on those busy work days when lunch is a long ways away).

Do you have a favourite way to prepare oatmeal?