Well, now you need to make some porridge and toast and give it a whirl. I was half-expecting you to ask me about the sorghum!
Growing up, we had what's labeled old-fashioned oats. They look like oat flakes. They're fine.
But in...I want to say 1993, we went on a driving holiday from Banbury (more or less), up the west coast of Scotland, across to Loch Ness, then down the other side and back home.
Our first couple of nights in Scotland, we stayed at this out-of-the-way hotel (which is now a mega conference centre thing) that was a named "Taste Of Scotland" hotel, meaning they made traditional Scottish foods to a high standard.
The first morning down to breakfast, we both ordered porridge. Why? Because it sounded Scottish. Nobody says porridge in the US. We only read about it, and it doesn't sound to appealing. It's always being used to feed little orphans in Dickens novels. Neither of us knew exactly what porridge was, so we thought we'd give it a go.
They brought it, and we ate it, and the first spoonful was, "Oh my- this is like cream and oatmeal and more cream and there's this syrup and this loose brown sugar...this is like candy and creamy and grainy all at the same time!"
This was like oatmeal, but oatmeal from heaven, and certainly not the "old-fashioned oats" from my youth. We were both hooked.
After that, that was something that went on our Tesco shopping list, because we couldn't get it at the American commissary, that's for sure. Happily, after moving back, we found an Irish store that sold a small bit of Irish groceries, and they carried it, but now it's sort of a trendy thing here, and even Quaker Oats sells it here, so it's easy to get now, and it's usually labeled steel-cut oats here.
You can't always find a place that knows how to make it, though. We once ate a fashionable diner outside St. Louis, and they advertised "authentic steel-cut oats made in the traditional method," so I ordered them, and I got a bowl of the oat pinheads soaking in water. It came with brown sugar, nuts, and raisins on the side, and a little pitcher of heavy cream.
I looked at them, went ahead and tried a bite, and they tasted exactly like what they were, oat pinheads floating in a bowl of room temperature water.
So I politely asked the waitress how these were prepared, and she said, "We pour water over them the night before, set them in the fridge, then drain the water and pour fresh water over them just before serving. You're welcome!"
Hmmmm...
