Mulberry Oatmeal

The other day I went to Tangier's food shop in Hartford, Connecticut.  I wanted to buy a bottle of Mymoune's Mulberry syrup that I had been eyeing for a while to make some drink recipes with.  The man at the store told me they had just sold their last one, which sort of shocked me.  I didn't realize that so many people in Hartford were consuming this specific fruit syrup.  Later when I was at home rumaging through our pantry, I found a bottle of Mymoune Mulberry syrup.  I was very surprised by this, and so I asked my mother why she had it, as she is not the mulberry-syrup type of woman.  She said that she had just bought the last bottle from Tangiers, because one of her friends had recommended it as an non-alcoholic drink with soda water and lime juice.  So the mulberry syrup and I were meant to be.  I remembered that I had dried white mulberries from Turkey, which I sometimes add into my oatmeal as a fruit in the winter.  The white dried mulberries are just a tad sweet and have a very slight chew to them.  My friend Cara tried them for the first time at my house and fell in love with their texture.  The mulberry syrup is made in Lebanon from fresh black mulberries and is sweet without being overpowering.  To make my Toot-y Fruity Mulberry Oatmeal dish I simply make oatmeal and add a few dried mulberries and a little bit of the fruit syrup as a sweetener, instead of honey for a delicious Mulberry Oatmeal Bowl.  You can add walnuts on top too, which also go very well wiith the fruit.  Mulberries are not so common in North America, in terms of us consuming them, though they are quite common in their presence.  They are very common, however, in the Eastern Mediterranean, Middle East, and Asia.  Their name in Arabic is Toot, hence my choosing Toot-y Fruity for the name of my oatmeal dish.  Mulberries are actually what silk worms eat as their sole food.  I will not go into too much detail about them, but will leave you with this link to learn more: http://www.dirtykitchensecrets.com/sharab-el-toot-making-mulberry-syrup/For Mulberry Syrup and Mulberries check out: http://www.tulumba.com/storeitem.asp?ic=FB249048BF152http://www.mymoune.com/eng/prfruitsyrop.html