Bedazzled Breakfast

I feel this picture is exemplary of our time spent around the Pooptown apartment.

We are using a chair as a table, someone's dirty socks are on the floor, one or both of us is reading/re-reading LOTR, and we are devouring reasonably healthy goodness for under the weighty sum of about 16 cents per person. It's a humble life.

So let's stretch the truth and call this a recipe post. I decided - and I mean, literally just now, as I was typing - that I will make a weekly post about food. Something I love here, something I less than love here, the things I make based on what we buy here; the works. Food is a BIG part of a place and how we experience it as people, I think. And I want to record that.

We're on a bit of a health binge over here in China, because last week we got a little crazy with the Chinese otter-pops and spoonfuls of peanut butter. It wasn't pretty. Luckily, eating healthy here is much, much less expensive than eating unhealthy - which is incentive. We buy fruit at the market by our house on a daily (sometimes twice-daily) basis, just because it's so easy and cheap. And fetching DELICIOUS.

The real find in our retail lives lately, though, was oatmeal. It costs a hefty 40 yuan at our grocery store, or around about 6 USD. Still. Having paid for entire meals for less than two dollars... that feels like an arm and a leg. Can't even do it. Luckily, this past weekend on our trip to QIngdao, a formerly German city on the sea - about an hour away from us - we were richly rewarded. OATMEAL. FOR CHEAP. I think because it was a port town, the snacks were off the HOOK. (Cue the need for health week.) I had a cheesecake slice there that honestly just tasted like cream cheese slapped onto some bread crumbs. And... it was GOOD. :/ Don't judge me, alll right?!

So here's the best bit of oatmeal advice you'll ever receive. Let's call it a recipe?

Bedazzled Breakfast

(Please. You know if I was gonna be a recipe blogger, I had to give it the tackiest name possible. I bet Deb from Napoleon Dynamite eats this for breakfast every morning.)

1 cup oatmeal, cooked

2 teaspoons Greek yogurt (add more or less according to taste)

1/2 seeds of a large pomegranate

(We... call the seeds jewels. Thus the "recipe" name. One night, we were being creepy and we likened eating a pomegranate to harvesting tiny jewels... and now all we do is call them jewels. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to remember to call them seeds in this post.)

Over a bowl of still hot oatmeal, add Greek yogurt. Add pomegranate seeds on top. Allow to cool slightly. Mix the melted yogurt and seeds thoroughly throughout the oatmeal. Eat. And feel classy. There are jewels in your dang oatmeal! And it's been sweetened without processed sugar. What is UP. I cannot emphasize how delicious this is. :) Try it sometime.