The Oatmeal of Madness

I have a propensity for rushing headlong into ludicrous undertakings. I will admit that.

I get oddly specific ideas in my head; romanticize the absolute shit out of them; and then go careening off wildly in an attempt to make them happen.

When my little inner dervish is revving up into one of those whirls, people close to me – rational people – typically do one of two things. They either: 1) look at me like I’m a lunatic and just shake their heads; or 2) they gently inquire as to whether I know what I’m doing.

The second of those is nearly rhetorical. Do I know what I’m doing? Of course, I don’t. Is that not patently obvious? There is virtually no undertaking of any kind which a person fluent in its successful completion would commence by “careening off wildly.” I careen. I’m a careener.

I just get some harebrained, grandiose idea in my head and then jump headlong into it.

Note: The key elements there were ‘harebrained’ and ‘grandiose’. What these larks lack in genius, they make up for in scale.

There was the time, for example, when I decided to prepare a Fat Tuesday feast for all of my coworkers complete with an authentic crawfish boil despite the fact that I lived in a third-floor walk-up with a small kitchen not typically stocked with live crawfish or suitable for boiling much more than an egg.

(Fun-fact: before cooking live crawfish, they need to be first “purged” in a salt bath. You can’t just give them a nice shower if your apartment only has a stall shower.)

The Fat Tuesday feast was maybe not my best idea. Having the live crawfish flown in before googling how to cook them, was also maybe not the best. Mistakes were made. That was fairly clear in hindsight if at no other point then when my then-girfriend found the crawfish parts in our shower.

At the time though, it seemed like a GREAT idea. Had you encountered me at any moment during the entire episode – even right after the crawfish shower debacle – and asked how it was going, I would have looked completely unbothered. I would have just looked at you with a calm confidence, grinned as if in on a secret known only to me, and said “Don’t worry, there’s a method to my madness.”

No, there most certainly was not.

There was just madness.

The only ‘method’ was me predictably, stumbling through a cartoonish sequence of disasters and setbacks in an effort to do something I was not remotely qualified to do which I had undertaken with great abandon anyway.

That is the kind of thing I tend to do, albeit a fairly benign example.

To really dimensionalize the sheer magnitude of the phenomenon, it’s probably easiest to just make up an example. A quick, make-believe version. Not a real story of something that occurred. A representation of a phenomenon which repeats. Just me using my powerful skills as a teller of stories to illustrate something, an allegory.

Our scene opens with our protagonist looking out the window at the winter skies above. It is mid-afternoon. The house is quiet. The days before had been hectic and so had the morning, but, at last, the commotion had calmed to a quiet. There was snow in the forecast. It was soon to arrive.

Our protagonist at the window – again, an invented Everyman just for illustrative purposes - was a 38-year old man named Mike who will have been long single by the time he decides to become a writer 14 years in the future but who is presently married and lives in suburban New Jersey with his wife.

It is Christmas Eve - only the second “Mike” and his wife have celebrated in their new home together. Family would be arriving soon and then staying over. There would be dinner later that night, and then a breakfast together the following morning, Christmas morning. By the looks of it, it would be a White Christmas.

Mike was ready to play host, and the home was ready for its guests. The tree was up and looked beautiful. The house was decorated and warm. Dinner had already been prepared. The fridge was well stocked and so was the wine rack.

All that was left to maybe do before people began to arrive was deciding on a warm dish for breakfast. French toast maybe. A frittata. Something served family style. Just something to go with the fruit, yogurt, granola, bagels, and spreads, already in the kitchen. If worse came to worst, it could be done without.

See, this is where in this illustrative example, a me-like person diverges from virtually all reasonable human beings.

Facing that scenario, a reasonable person would probably do something also reasonable like picking up their phone and doing a quick web search for “easy holiday breakfast ideas.” That would be quite reasonable to do, and it would produce reasonable search results like a link to a list of “10 Easy and Delicious Christmas Morning Menus” hosted on some popular recipe site. A reasonable person would then just go ahead and click on that link and scroll through that list and pick something quite sane like ‘Delicious 10-Minute Baked French Toast’. That is what a reasonable person would do.

A me-like person, the allegorical me in this invented scenario, would not do that. No, they would pick up their phone and do the same web search and find the same listicle on the same site as the reasonable person and would click on it… but then they would do only a cursory scroll through the ideas before concluding they were all woefully insufficient. The me-like person would then rapidly exit that page with a near indignance at how lifeless, unimaginative, and banal the suggestions had been.

10-minute Baked French Toast? What is this? A fucking complimentary buffet at a Days Inn? It’s Christmas! These people are MY FAMILY! IT’S CHRISTMAS! Ya know… George Bailey. Merry Christmas, Bedford Falls. Nat King Cole. Chestnuts *roasting* on an open fire not chestnuts being lazily baked for ten fucking minutes like you don’t give a shit.

The me-like person would be immediately resolute in the conclusion that the shortcoming hadn’t been just that one list; it had been the sheer Scroogery of selecting one’s Christmas menu on the basis of ease of preparation. No, that would not do. All such lists were out of the question. Anything found on them would be inherently insufficient in the specialness a ‘warm Christmas morning breakfast-something’ should have.

The illustrative me in this scenario would then commence their own ad hoc search in the main recipe database, and would then review and then dismiss an absurd volume of recipes until reaching The One…

The answer. Revealed as if the newly born king, gazed upon by a lone wiseman who had journeyed through many recipes to find it.

The One:

Hearty Steel-Cut Cinnamon-Brown Sugar Oatmeal Brûlée.

That is what a me-like person would choose to make for reasons inscrutable to anyone else.

Then, once committed to the making of A Great Christmas Oatmeal, that person would then go rushing out of the house even though it was heading on toward evening at that point and had started to snow now and people would be coming soon and he could have just poured himself a glass of port and not been a lunatic.

He could have just decided to bake some damn French toast but, nooooo, he would instead go tearing off toward Williams-Sonoma to buy fucking ceramic ramekins(!) because 1) the oatmeal brûlée recipe on Epicurious had called for them; and 2) as a man who had been single until only recently, he had never had any occasion whatsoever where he had felt driven to purchase situational cookware of any kind let alone ramekins.

Were they truly necessary? Couldn’t he have just used regular bowls? No, he could not. The oatmeal in the picture was prepared in a ramekin. That must have been necessary somehow.

So, off he would go, racing to purchase what would assuredly be absurdly expensive and likely single-use ceramics all because in the space of the one hour prior, in his head, they had become vital to saving Christmas.

See? You see it, right? You see where the illustrative Mike strays just a liiiiittle bit wide of reasonable adult behavior, yes?

That’s why the illustration was helpful.

The key here wasn’t his wanting to make something nice on a special occasion, of course. That was probably kind of sweet, actually. It was just an issue of reasonableness. Oatmeal brûlée might be a lovely dish, but it probably isn’t the kind of thing one should likely choose to make 1) at the last minute; 2) when they don’t already have the necessary materials; 3) Williams-Sonoma is closing in 45 minutes; and 4) they don’t even cook, really.

That’s where the illustrative me went astray of someone possessing good judgment even on Christmas Eve. A reasonable person would make the French toast. An unreasonable person would run out for ramekins.

I don’t know where I came up with that specific light, humorous, illustration, but I have a history of doing that kind of thing.

It sounds like a Christmas movie, doesn’t it? Someone making a frantic Christmas Eve ramekin run for some harebrained oatmeal recipe. All the illustration was missing to be a holiday comedy was the clerk at Williams-Sonoma taking foreeeeeever to individually wrap *24 ramekins of varying sizes* in that beige-y paper they use for glassware while the protagonist kept anxiously looking at his watch.

Hahahaha, that’s totally what would happen in a movie.

On a related not, my god, the clerk took forever. FOREVER. I told her I didn’t even need the ramekins to be wrapped. I’d just take my chances. She insisted. I was already late getting home because of course I was. I had stood over those damn ramekins for way too long belaboring which size offered the exact right balance of aesthetic presentation and oatmeal capacity.

Ultimately, I had decided it was too crucial a call to make under duress like that, so I had bought all three sizes – and eight of each – despite there not even being eight of us at breakfast the next day. I literally bought *extra ramekins* as if that was some kind of shrewd investment. I bought them in eights as if I was just going to start recreationally brûlée’ing things all the time now and I’d assuredly need enough for an octet at some point.

I did that. I bought 24 ramekins as Williams-Sonoma closed one Christmas Eve. Oh, and a blowtorch. I also bought a blowtorch.

For oatmeal.

To make oatmeal.

In my defense, I will say this…

I brûlée’d the absolute shit out of that oatmeal and it was really good.

In retrospect, my one self-criticism would be that I should have used the smaller ramekins. Nobody needs that much steel-cut cinnamon-brown sugar oatmeal on Christmas morning or any other day.

Lost on me during this entire episode was that nobody really needed steel-cut cinnamon brown-sugar oatmeal brûlée at all, really. I decided to make it, and once I had, I would have had a knife fight in the mean streets of Williams-Sonoma had someone tried to pry my ramekins from my merry damn hands.

That was 15 years ago.

I have only used those ramekins on one other occasion.

But that is a story for Part II… which I’ll post tomorrow.