I hate oatmeal. It's so bland. It comes in two textures: dry or gooey. Either way, it sticks to my throat when I try to down it.

Of course, oatmeal is one of the recommended foods for coronary artery disease. Why couldn't it be KFC? I'd be so very happy with that.

Out of desperation, instead of trying to sweeten it up, to pretend it's cookie dough or soufflé or some other goodie, I decided to go the other way.

Soup base. Salt-free seasoning mix. Low sodium soy sauce. (And a dash of seasoned salt, oops.) Savory oatmeal. I actually like it, and am tempted to make more. No, I shouldn't, I need to control portion size and get my tummy used to not being stuffed silly.

I think it's a Chinese thing. We have a way of disposing of leftover rice (and, when you consider how much rice China cooks, there's gotta be a lot of leftovers.) We make jook out of it. No, jook in this case isn't a jazz thing. It's rice boiled until the kernels nearly split in two. They look sort of like X-chromosome, though larger. ;)

Yep, take some rice, boil it. Boil it some more. Add more water, and keep boiling it. When it barely has any consistency left, then serve hot. And I mean hot. I've plenty of memories of first-degree burns in my mouth from it.

It's quite bland. And gooey. However, they serve it with a variety of goods, some of them even edible to Western eyes and ears. Bits of pork, BBQ and otherwise. Thousand-year-old eggs. Strips of raw fish, cut so thin they get cooked in the jook. Black beans, the same ones they make soy sauce out of. Soy sauce. Oyster sauce. Pickled bean curd. Spicy hot pickled bean curd. Okay, that's about it for the 'edible to Westerners' I can think of. The rest of it isn't even edible to me.

So, to me, oatmeal goes down so very well when I pretend it's jook and season it likewise.

Now, if I can just get the call of Col. Sanders out of my mind...