Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

My condolences to his family, the employees of Ben's and to the residents and visitors of Washington D.C.

I only had the pleasure of visiting once but his restaurant should be considered an American treasure.

I am not sure where I fit in. My favorite oatmeal is baked oatmeal that I started to have when I moved to the Pennsylvania Dutch country of southeastern PA. I can offer a recipe but more or less it is some of your typical oatmeal combinations with egg and baking powder mixed in and then baked like a coffee cake. It is hard to describe if you never had it - the oats have more texture (stay more intact) yet they stick together into a cake. Here is a basic recipe that serves about 6.

3 cups Oatmeal (old-fashioned = best texture), ¾ cup Brown sugar,
1 ½ cup Milk, 3 whole eggs, 1 ¼ tsp. Baking powder, ½ tsp. Salt
6 Tbsp. Melted butter or margarine

Mix all ingredients together. Pour into a greased 3 qt casserole dish. Bake at 350 degrees for 1 to 1 ½ hour or until center seems set and top is golden brown. Serve straight from the oven or keep it warm. Serve with warm milk.

You can add vanilla, spices, dried or fresh fruit, or about anything else folks have suggested.

No chemicals, right..... Then why does it look like something from a 1950's horror movie that is about to eat his head?

Sorry to harp on it but the flashback to Romany Steak made we wonder if I only imagined it. I searched "romany steak" with the quotes on Google and it came up with only two hits. The second was a 1959 newspaper clipping (obituaries and school menu on the same page - hmmm!?) that listed Romany Steak and Mashed Potatoes.

What I cannot decide is whether it makes me feel better or worse to know I didn't imagine it.

In my elementary school (Hopewell Elementary, West Chester, Ohio), the worst in my memory is something called "Romany Steak". It was frequently nicknamed Romany Snake due to its mystery meat appearance. I probably remember it even worse than it was but my recollection was that it appeared to be catfood that was broken up in water to make a sort of sauce that was served over noodles or mashed potatoes (I forget which). What any of this had to do with Romany or Steak, I cannot imagine.

I work in the dairy industry and can tell you that the specks are mainly for show. Someone else mentioned that they could be ground up pods and that is essentially correct. When they make vanilla extract the pods and seeds are mashed up and soaked in ethanol to extract the flavor components. Once the extract is removed, the pods and seeds are dried and ground further to make the specks. There may be some residual flavor in the specks but not much. An ice cream manufacturer will buy those specks from a vanilla supplier by the boxful and add them to the ice cream along with extract to get the flavor.

A better indicator of quality is whether the flavor is vanilla extract only since that is a defined flavoring. If the label says vanilla and other natural flavors, that means the flavor company has padded out the natural vanilla with additional natural flavor components to tweak the profile. And, of course, when the labels starts talking about artifical flavor and vanillin, walk away.

As a former employee of one of those contract manufacturers, I saw first hand how Trader Joe's worked. They bought one cheese spread from us with their brand name in addition to one product with one of our own brands. Their approach was to buy a bunch of product at once in cartons with a large number of units to keep costs down.

And if anyone is worried that this somehow compromises their quality, I have this story. The product we made for them was without preservative (potassium sorbate) but we also made versions of the same product for others that included preservatives. Try as we might to keep their product separate, one batch had some trivial carryover of the preservative at a level that was below an effective level but was detected by their quality team. As they should have, they rejected that load but they went the step further of ending our contract because of that one slip.

They were a tough customer when it came to anything quality related.