I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world. Mastodon Verification Link	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he migrated to the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

My lovely wife recently clipped a recipe for me from a magazine - the AARP magazine, I believe. It was Mark Bittman writing about "Summer Cobblers," and the one that caught her eye was for a tomato cobbler. The recipe itself is pretty good, and well worth tracking down. However, I can rarely leave well enough alone, and decided to adapt, alter, adulterate, and other verbs-beginning-with-a it.

I'd been messing about with a variety of oatcake recipes (and I use recipe here in the loosest possible sense), and this seemed like yet another place to use oats. The result is good, although to be honest, I don't know if I should call it a cobbler anymore. I use oats with an egg binder to make a fairly sturdy top. You could omit the egg, of course, and the result will be crumblier - I make oatcakes with and without egg and that textural change is the main difference. I've since made it with just egg whites, since I needed egg yolks for Flathonys. That works pretty well, too.

Per serving:

• tomatoes, one large, a couple medium, three smallish, six cherry, or thereabouts
• a splash of olive oil
• an egg
• a Tbs or so of milk
• salt
• pepper
• oats, 1/2 cup or more

Light beat the egg with the milk and more salt and pepper than you think you'll need. Add the oats and mix until you have a stiff batter-like consistency. The amount you need will vary a bit depending on your oats, the humidity, phase of the moon, and so on. It should be at least 1/2 cup and probably more. Oats just suck the liquid right up.

Spoon the batter on top of the tomatoes and spread it around. Pop it into a medium oven, 180C/350F or so, for twenty minutes. Check it, it should be browned a bit on top. Remove from the oven and eat carefully - the tomatoes are essentially little bombs of flavored water near the boiling point. Which is a good thing.