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.

I am enjoying my new job, and as noted here, my workplace has an excellently equipped kitchen - which I hardly ever exploit. Instead, for lunch I often take leftovers to reheat, and if I haven't any leftovers, I usually opt for a one-dish microwavable meal. In the last few months, this has mainly consisted of savoury oatmeal dishes, or, after I found barley flakes at a local shop, barley flakes - which look like oatmeal/rolled oats but are made of barley!

I'm not going to give much in the way of specific recipes today, rather I'm going to wax poetic about oats, and share some ideas for easy hot lunches that I've made and enjoyed recently.

People in my office look at me as though I'm odd when I make my savoury oat (or barley) lunches. Setting aside for the moment the indisputable fact that I am odd, I find their consternation a bit odd. I understand that most people think of oatmeal as a sweet breakfast food, but savoury oat dishes are not unheard of - I jokingly described one meal as "skinless vegetarian haggis."

Like any other whole grain, oats are good for you. They are often cited as helpful in managing cholesterol. They are filling. They are delicious. And, as I hope to show, both flexible and easy to prepare.

I'll start with the closest thing to a recipe I'm going to provide, and which is illustrated in the admittedly less than completely attractive pictures above and to the right. We can call it, oh, Cheesy Oatkraut. It is simplicity itself. Put some sauerkraut, ideally homemade of course, in the bottom of a microwave safe container. Put some mustard on. Then top it with some cheese, as much asyou like, and some oats. The oats and cheese go on top because if the mustard is on top and the container is jostled, the mustard sticks to the lid. To prepare, add water - hot water if you've got it - to the container. Stir, microwave for as long as it takes to get everything hot and to get your oats to the texture you like. Stir and eat - delicious.

If I've got leftover soup or chili that I want to take, I'll often top it off with oats and then nuke it up, adding water if needed. Sometimes I need to add some more seasoning in this case, since the oats are fairly bland.

If there aren't any leftovers, I tend to default to something like this: I load my container with oats, and sometimes some seasoning, but sometimes not. Then I acquire some eggs - either sticking them into the container at home, or buying some to keep at the office for just such a purpose. For preparation, first I add hot water to the oats. This next bit is the clever bit. You see, one of the problems with cooking oats in a microwave is that they tend to bubble up, to the point of spilling out of your container, making a sticky, gluey mess. If you crack your egg or eggs gently so that they spread out on top of the oats, they keep the oats from boiling over! Then microwave the whole thing until the eggs reach your preferred level of doneness. I usually douse it liberally with hot sauce at this point.

It's not quite oats and water cooked on a hot rock like a medieval Scottish warrior, but you can still eat it to "comfort withal [your] stomach," as Froissart puts it.