Pease Porridge Hot

It's been a pretty nippy winter in these here parts and I've put away my beloved Stoneyfield Whole Milk Vanilla Yogurt over fruit and muesli for something warm in my breakfast bowl.

We've always been fans of Cream of Wheat. My favorite way to eat this stuff is to make it with milk and dish it up, add a bit of butter and a generous helping of finely grated Parmigiano Reggiano. One bite - ecstasy. My son loves this throwback to his childhood with a few chocolate chips sprinkled into the bottom of his bowl, let it sit a minute and stir up the chocolate swirls. Recently I have become an oatmeal convert although I have always hated the stuff. I suffer from bad memories of my mother cooking oats the night before and leaving the stuff on the stove overnight for my fathers breakfast. The sight of the coagulated mush, giant cracks across the top, turned my stomach. All this changed when I discovered a nifty looking can on my grocer's shelf. I had never had steel cut oats before and so I thought, nothing ventured, nothing gained. McCann's Oatmeal is still made in County Kildare and I will venture to say that the can hasn't changed one bit since then. The cooking instructions are pretty spartan and there are no "back-of-the-can" recipes either. Once home, I read those spartan cooking instructions and realized that it would take at least a half hour for this stuff to fill my tummy. The can sat in my pantry, forgotten, for several weeks before I hauled it out for a cold weekend morning meal. We were out of the ubiquitous Quaker Oats that Tom loves to eat. He's not picky. The instant pouch is good enough for him.  So, I set 4 cups of water on to boil, added a dash of salt and 1 cup of steel cut oats and sat down to read the paper. I got up to wipe the boiling mess off the stove and stirred it a bit and let it simmer some more. After half an hour we had a pot of creamy goodness. I tucked a handful of raisins in each bowl and topped it off with a generous pour of grade A maple syrup. If this is what oatmeal is supposed to taste like, bring it on. No rolled oats for me, make mine steely cut!