Mmm ... milk ...

After I came back from China I discovered I had become rather lactose intolerant. This can happen sometimes as you get older or you stop consuming dairy products, thereby losing the need to create the enzyme that breaks down lactose, the sugar structure found in milk.

I was quite determined to reacquire my little enzyme [lactase, I think it is ... right?]

Mission mostly successful, I would say.

Oatmeal with milk. Never grew up on oatmeal, not really sure of the proper way to cook it. I quasi-simmer it [need to brush up on those chef-ly terminologies] in milk until the oats plump up and gets really thick and gooey. Guess I'm a gooey oatmeal kinda gal, just like I'm a gooey jook kinda quarter-Cantonese person. Here I plopped in some dried cranberries which plumped up beautifully, and some walnuts though they didn't plump up one bit.

So it occurs to me that if you're cooking milk at high temperatures, all the wonderful milk proteins will probably denature. Hm. Oops, yet not ... I think. After all, all the amino acids that make up the proteins should still be in tact, so even if the 3D structure of the protein has been altered the building blocks are still perfectly fine to be taken up by your body and made into the proteins that your body needs ... right? Any nutri sci people out there?