Enthused by Meg's suggestion, I bought a tin of McCann's Steel-Cut Oatmeal and determined to try making some oatmeal on the stovetop. The instructions on the tin call for sprinkling 1 cup of oatmeal into 4 cups of briskly boiling water, but I wanted to try it with milk. I also didn't need to make four servings, so I halved the recipe and set 2 cups of milk in a pot on high heat to boil. In less than a minute, the milk poofed up and shot out of the pot and poured all over the stove. Sigh. I'm getting way too familiar with the process of cleaning this stove.

Later in the day I decided to try again, using water as the recipe prescribes, with no variation other than halving the ingredients. It still tried to boil over, but I was able to control it and keep most of it in the pot by lifting the pot off the burner for a few seconds to let the bubbles fall back down. Still, the attempt was a failure. The instructions on the tin say to stir the oatmeal into the boiling water and continue stirring until the porridge becomes smooth and starts to thicken. At that point, you're supposed to lower the heat and let it simmer for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Conspicuously absent from the instructions, however, is some estimation of how long it should take for the porridge to become smooth and start to thicken.

I stirred for about 20 minutes before it started to look like something other than grains in a pot of water. At that point, in the span of a few minutes it quickly started looking quite a bit like oatmeal. I lowered the heat and let it simmer, though it looked pretty good already and I was tempted to just take it off the stove as it was. But I had learned my lesson about deviating from the recipe — I was determined to follow its lead to the letter this time.

After five minutes on low heat, the porridge was starting to look dried out and crackly and gross, so I took it off the stove and threw it away with a sigh. What the hell, how can it be so hard to make something that consists of nothing but grain and water?

I did some more searching and found a site that estimates that the first step should only take about 4-6 minutes. My 'porridge' still looked quite a bit like a pot of water with crap in it at that point, but I suppose tomorrow I'll give it another shot and lower the heat after six minutes and see how that turns out.