This page is usually about delicious, rarely about health. This is actually crazy, when you consider that proper nutrition can contribute so much to the good functioning of the body, and thus to happiness in life, and thus ultimately to the enjoyment of good things like good food. The problem, of course, is that the word “correct”. What is the correct diet? What is healthy? As long as scientists are still squabbling among themselves about this, it will be difficult for us simple foodies to determine the course.
However, there are ingredients that everyone thinks are suitable for a healthy diet. Note this wording, I’m not intentionally writing that it’s healthy. Because that’s exactly the problem: healthy food doesn’t exist. Anyone who claims that avocados are healthy should try to live on avocados for a few months. or on chia seeds. or on turmeric. Moreover, what is good for one person is not necessarily good for another. What is healthy varies from person to person.
Well, with an argument like this, we never really got to what I want to argue: that oats are a perfectly healthy grain, or, more accurately, a grain that it wouldn’t hurt most people to eat regularly. You might already be doing it in the form of oatmeal porridge or muesli, in the form of oat milk in your coffee, or in the form of a little less Verkades oats with a layer of milk chocolate (ahem), but did you know that as oats make you so happy? Can delicious biscuits be baked easily?
More on that later. The first thing about the pills themselves. This belongs to the weeds, which originated from Asia Minor and were cultivated there at least seven thousand years before our era. Sometime during the Bronze Age, the crop ended in northwest Europe, where it has always remained less important than wheat. Today, Spain, Poland and Finland are the largest producers of oats in Europe. (Russia is the largest in the world).
According to the Netherlands statistics, only 1,387 hectares of oats are grown in the Netherlands. That was different in the last century: according to Wageningen University, in 1960 there were still about 160,000 hectares of oats. After that, demand declined rapidly, mainly due to the agricultural shift from horsepower to tractors. But thanks to the growing popularity of oat drinks as an alternative to cow’s milk and the growing interest in gluten-free grains, demand has increased dramatically in recent years. So who knows, there may be great opportunities here for arable farming in the Netherlands.
I wouldn’t take all the health claims the pills make, from cholesterol-lowering beta-glucans to high in polyunsaturated fatty acids and having all the essential amino acids. This is the point where we return to ‘tasty’. So those crackers. Even two kinds of crackers. The first thing we’ll bake is what they’re made in the UK oatmeal cake To call. Admittedly, they don’t taste exciting on their own, but that’s exactly why they’re the perfect, interesting cheese-based crackers.
In the second recipe, we simply put the cheese in the biscuit. Combined with ground pumpkin seeds, oregano, and a pinch of freshly ground pepper, this cheesecake makes a heavy snack satisfying. Although they are delicious enough to eat as is, nothing stops you from investing in them. The fatty stuff in particular works well: a boiled egg, chickpeas, avocado, this helps.
Oats do not contain gluten, but often come into contact with gluten-containing grains such as wheat during processing. Therefore, if you have a gluten intolerance, use only oat products that bear the official gluten-free logo (a corn stalk with italics through it).
