Welcome to Jurassic Park: Overnight oats edition
Open the door, get on the floor, everybody do the dinosaur (oatmeal)
Hello, dickholios!
I call you dickholes affectionately. Try going up to a stranger on the street and call them a dickhole. It’s a good way to make a new friend. Also, try never taking my advice.
It’s that time again.
The time where we answer culinary questions that you never actually asked.
While there are people out in this world trying to end conflicts, cure diseases, and save the environment, I’m over here in the corner cackling at dick jokes and, like, trying to find a way to make asphalt edible or some other dumb shit.
This week’s unholy shenanigan involves less of cobbling a recipe together, but testing a cooking technique: Overnight oats!
I was scrolling through Instagram (my feed is primarily food, sometimes cute pets, and recreational surgery pictures), I saw something my pal Marissa posted.
Overnight oats seems to be a cool thing to do lately, if you’re a healthy person and you do not consume garbage, like I do, on a daily basis. Some of my coworkers make overnight oats and swear by them.
Being a skeptic, I imagined that overnight oats would taste like chalky horse feed. I generally hate microwaved oatmeal. It’s got the texture of mealy mucus. Scrumptious.
So I said to myself, “Dannis Ree, what if overnight oats are actually very good and you’re just being a dangly old scrotum? Either try it and triple down on your hatred, or make inner peace with your oaty oats, you dumb oathead.”
Davida shouted, “I know, I know! What about overnight dinosaur oats?”
You have Marissa and Davida to thank today.
Apparently I was a deprived child, because I’d never had dinosaur egg oatmeal.
It’s flavored oatmeal with these little eggs in it. When you cook it (properly), the eggs dissolve, revealing a tiny dinosaur. That’s cute. Nourishing and entertaining at the same time, just like my butthole.
The packaging is already horseshit.
On the box you see colorful Easter-like eggs, about to reveal a little reptilian bundle of joy. But straight from the packet, you get eggs that appear to be going through some sort of depressive episode.
This 32 second video sums up how I felt.
I ceremoniously dumped some milk into the tupperware container and sent it off to the cryo-chamber (refrigerator) to incubate overnight, but not before eating a couple uncooked dinosaur eggies.
The texture was very strange. I’d imagined it would be like biting into one of those shitty sugar candies stuck to paper (some of you know what I’m talking about). In reality, it felt like eating a candle. Candles. We’re feeding children candles.
I gave one to Davida, who thoughtfully said, “It tastes like what you’d yell at a toddler for eating.”
The next day, we cooked up the oatmeal like you’re supposed to, for a side-by-side tasting.
The eggs indeed did dissolve, revealing grotesque blobs behind. Dinosaurs my ass. This is like pointing at a stapler and saying, “Dog. This looks like a dog.”
After digging around some more, we revealed a rare dinosaur, called the Blood-Clot-o-saurus.
I had a few spoonfuls. Dinosaur egg oatmeal is very sweet, flavored with brown sugar, to the point where I was concerned for the kids who were eating it. The oatmeal was still as I remembered, mushy and mucilaginous. The dinosaurs really didn’t do much aside from being little sweet crunchy bits.
Balut. We were eating dinosaur balut.
I guess I put too much milk into the overnight oats. For some reason I assumed the oats would just soak up the milk and get all puffy or something.
After a spoonful of just the oats, I…
I…
I actually liked them.
Fuck!
The texture of the oats wasn’t phlegmy at all. Each spoonful tasted nourishing (especially since the sugar was diluted into the milk). I grudgingly decided that overnight oats would make a good breakfast and I’d try making them, you know, nicely someday.
But the eggs, on the other hand?
Davida took one bite and said, “Nope.”
They either fractured or didn’t melt at all! Whatever waxy shell was outside the eggs did dissolve, leaving a nugget of pure tooth-cracking machine-compressed sugar. Each bite of an egg felt like it was jacking up my blood sugar level. A lot of unborn dinosaurs died in my mouth that day.
Next time I’ll just put them where they really belong: Up my ass.
Move over, Gwyneth Paltrow. There’s a new sheriff in Jurassic Park, and his name is Dannis Ree.
Thanks again for making it this far.
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