But that's no doubt why so much effort has gone into making oatmeal palatable over the years. It's good food, but in its natural state, it has less taste than cardboard.

That said, I cook oatmeal from scratch in my rice cooker, which turns out to do an amazing job cooking anything involving water and heat. Steams veggies like a champ. But you probably know that, having dropped the word rice out of nowhere into your post. Currently I'm working through a bag of cut oats, aka "Irish style". I just add raisins and a drop of olive oil before cooking, and a little brown sugar and a drop of milk afterward. In the past I've combined all sorts of dried fruit and nuts with oatmeal, so I heartily approve of most everything in your recipe.

I'm onboard with most of your use of olive oil--a dab of oil in the boiling water is helpful to oatmeal (and rice). Browning the pine nuts will enhance their flavor. But I think if you add a "layer" of oil at the end, it isn't helping with the cooking (it won't become an infusion spread evenly throughout the fluid), but rather, it'll just coat the oat grains at the end. And a good olive oil has flavor, depending on the strain, and I've never met an olive oil whose taste I'd find compatible with oats. The taste is cooked out when added early, but would linger added at the end. Wouldn't it? I admit I haven't tried your recipe, but I'm loathe to try for fear of ruining a perfectly (otherwise) (relatively) good batch of oatmeal.

Were you still hanging around the Zone when I had a heart attack in 2008? I could go on for page after page about all I've learned about healthier cooking since then, in what I think of as The Quest for Flavor. (In a word: taste bud synesthesia. Bludgeon your taste buds with spices and they'll forget all about salt. But all that's for another time.) Anyway, the point is, oatmeal is the first item on the list they give you of "heart healthy" foods, which is really a downer given most peoples' experience with oatmeal. But the genuinely dangerous downer is that first hospital "heart-healthy" meal--it's just awful-to-start-with hospital food with all the salt and fat--aka "flavor"--removed. I seriously questioned whether living would be worthwhile if that was what I had to look forward to for the rest of my life. For me, learning to cook "heart healthy" with flavor has literally been a matter of life or death.

How's your health, Dan? We've all gotten to the stage in life where that question is part of watching each others' backs.