Rice Cooker Oatmeal Sundaes

I won't lie to you. Breakfast is a tough meal at our house. A box of cereal doesn't last very long; we run out of bread; I can't fix scrambled eggs anymore (egg allergy in the house now); I can never make pancakes as quickly as I think I can. Then I found an oatmeal recipe that has saved breakfast for me.

My kids like oatmeal but try as I might in making real oatmeal (from steel-cut oats which I love), they prefer the little packets. Yuck. We finally ran out of them about a month ago and the girls wanted oatmeal for breakfast. So I was looking through my cookbooks (I only have one or two.....hundred) for a quick, tasty recipe. And I found one!

Rice Cooker Oatmeal. Brilliant idea.
4 cups water & 2 cups quick-cooking oatmeal in the rice cooker.
Turn it on. Walk away.
(Those are my instructions not necessarily what the recipe in the book says.)

When it's done, put in a little butter (about 1 Tbsp), some brown sugar (maybe 1/4 cup) and 2 tsp or so of maple syrup. Stir it around. Scoop it up into bowls.

But you're not done!

What do you usually put on oatmeal? Cream and sugar, right? Why not vanilla ice cream? It's just cream and sugar. (Thank you Mary Ostyn for this fabulous idea!) So I top the oatmeal with a small scoop of vanilla ice cream and a drizzle of maple syrup over the top.

My girls L.O.V.E this oatmeal. They never want any other kind again. And who wouldn't love it? It's creamy and sweet and you get to have ice cream for breakfast!

I took a picture of it but, as you can see, the camera was in a fightin' mood this morning and flat out refused to be in focus no matter what. ARG! I hate it when things get a mind of their own.

Since the picture's not very clear, just imagine a bowl of light-brown creamy oatmeal with a little vanilla bean ice cream sitting in the middle, slowly melting, and a little stream of rich maple syrup around the edge. Yum!