Oats in Curry

Oats in Curry

You read a lot nowadays about how processed food and pollution are killing us, awakening the cancers in our bodies and clogging up all our arteries. It is ironic that as Science prolongs the human life, we end up killing ourselves through the way we chose to live.

I am, unfortunately, one of those unhealthy people guilty of not eating enough fibre, preferring a largely protein and carbohydrate diet, and also not doing much physical exercise as a general rule.

My mum is currently an avid reader of the Mind Your Body column in the Straits Times and she really watches what she eats for a couple of years now. That's the same mum who was feeding us snacks all day long when we were kids, fried frozen food from the supermarket (especially during the boom import years when Singapore started becoming very quickly industrialised) and yummy restaurant fare on weekends and during outings.

You look at my siblings and myself and you know that genes apart, we have picked up our fat body shape and generally bad eating habits from those years and it's not possible to turn back the clock. As a mother, I have passed on some of these bad habits to my own children and they are even worse eaters than I've ever been. I started out really well when they were babies and I had to prepare their baby food daily and fresh, but once they started being able to eat food from outside, all my good resolutions flew out of the window and I basically fed them as I would myself.

At the same time, I really think that we should enjoy our food and I wake up every morning looking forward to what I would savour in the day. My grand aunt died when she was 100 years old (the one who used to teach Mrs LKY Geography in MGS, and who was the wife of my illustrous grand uncle Dr. Lim Tay Boh) and as far as I could remember, she spent decades basically eating only boiled vegetables and very little meat (also boiled). I don't think I can live like that, I'd be happy to die of a heart attack later on in life if I'd had my fill of good steaks and other sinful delights.

But you can see that I've nonetheless given some thought to the subject, so I made a resolution to at least eat more healthy stuff like oats whenever I can. The other day I made a chicken curry (actually I make a curry or 2 every week) and we finished most of the meat leaving the equivalent of a small bowl of the gravy behind.

For breakfast the next day, I reheated the gravy with a few tablespoons of rolled oats without overcooking them. Oats in Curry tasted surprisingly pleasant, almost like a dal.

I endeavour to repeat this dish as often as I can in times to come, in fact, I also had oats in Bak Kut Teh a few days later.