I hate to do the same things over, and over, and over again. This is why we do so much cooking in large batches for the freezer. Our little Turkey is on a gluten limited diet and eats mainly oatmeal for breakfast. Up until about a month ago, almost every day I would:
get out the measuring spoon and scoop his oatmeal out of the canister, put two scoops of water in, put scoop in sink, microwave, get sugar out, mix in some sugar, taste test, add more sugar, put sugar up, get cinnamon out, add cinnamon, put cinnamon up, serve the oatmeal.
All for just one bowl of oatmeal. I figured there had to be a better way. Several months back MoneySavingMom made up little baggies of oatmeal. I didn’t want to have a lot of baggies or to measure it into baggies, so I decided to see if I could come up with a recipe that would let me leave it all in the canister. Turns out it wasn’t too difficult at all:
Dump 1/2 canister of oatmeal into a gallon ziplock
Add 1/2 cup sugar and 1 Tsp cinnamon
Dump other 1/2 canister of oatmeal into the same ziplock
Add 1/2 cup sugar and 1 Tsp cinnamon
Shake well, then put back into canister.
We thought the sugar and cinnamon might all settle on the bottom, but they didn’t. Just follow the normal instructions for preparation. (I use an old measuring scoop and put 1 part oatmeal to 2 parts water, this way if the baby is eating too I can easily make a bit more) So much easier than getting sugar and cinnamon out every time and having to taste test to see if I got the proportions right. Every little bit of sanity saved helps right? 
Cost per serving? $.04 if everything was bought at rock bottom prices, or $.12 if you pay shelf price (Mom’s Best Oatmeal is $1 everyday at Walmart) Either way, it sure beats paying $1.50-$2.00 for an 8 count box of oatmeal packets!
Update: You can also make strawberry oatmeal by mixing one box of strawberry jello with your cup of sugar and your oatmeal. Also, I recently realized that oatmeal packets only have 1/4 cup of oatmeal in them, so an 11 serving canister is actually 2.5 times as much oatmeal as you buy in a box of 8 packets!
In case you’re wondering about the paper towels in the background of the picture, look closer and you’ll see they are snowmen. Yep- picture taken on April 8th. We put the roll up right after we moved into this house and just finished it a couple of weeks ago. I wasn’t kidding when I said we usually only used 3 rolls a year!
This is part of Works for Me Wednesday over at We are That Family and the Grocery Cart Challenge’s Recipe Swap
If you’d like more tips for your household, hop on over to see what Perfectly Practical Ideas Pary Moppins has today.
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