Q: What's oat cuisine?

A: I used to correspond with a mail art pal from Dundee, Scotland, who slept on a palette on the floor and ate oak cakes. Pete Horobin.

They're good with Stilton cheese and Scotch marmalade.

He ate them without Stilton cheese and Scotch marmalade.

He couldn't afford Stilton cheese and Scotch marmalade.

But he could afford oat cakes.

Q: So it's a play on haute cuisine?

A: Of course. It's a low cuisine. Based on whole-grain cereals.

Brenda makes a gruel every morning that's half seven-grain cereal and half rolled oats.

With blueberries, cinnamon, plain yogurt, and tupelo honey, for the local pollen allergies.

Q: Owen was going to put a hoecake plaster on Ella for her chest congestion.

A: You cut a hoecake in half, put pine tar on both insides, and tie it to the chest and back with a bedsheet. I don't think he wants to do that.

But he did say to make a pot of dried beans and take it to the Lewis Family concert in the Springfield Community Church.

With carrots, onion, bell pepper, tomatoes, and jalapeno peppers.

He said the whole family will show up with a cup, for some of Owen's beans.

Mm-hmm. Dried beans and brown rice. Once a week. Red beans on Monday. Black beans on the weekend, with chicken marinated in mojo criollo sauce, with kumquats off our tree. Brenda's fresh garden cilantro. A kumquat's as good as a Seville orange, which is sour. You need a sour orange for mojo criollo.

Q: Or Scotch marmalade.

A: There you go.