Cherish your bowels

One of the gob-blowing experiences of my early life was to consume porridge made with pinhead oatmeal. I was 16 and had been taken on a self-catering holiday for a week in Tobermory, Mull with the family of my oldest pal, because my mother was sick in hospital. The first trip to the shops came back with a bag of pinhead oatmeal, aliquots of which were soaked over-night and boiled up for breakfast each day. Compared to 'normal' porridge it was as oude Gouda to Kraft slices.

[[That was the first time m'mother had been in hospital in her life. She had a bowel obstruction that required surgery to remove a length of her transverse colon and install a temporary colostomy. It didn't require the surgeon to nick her spleen down there in the bloody dark. In recovery, she was allowed home for a weekend, and while pottering about after several weeks in bed, the exercise required some extra red blood cells. Her spleen obligingly puckered up to deliver them and burst asunder. Home was 15 miles from the hospital and she'd lost A Lot of blood by the time she returned to theatre for a total splenectomy. That's when she had her near death experience (tunnel, lights and all). If you've ever had a 'stitch' in your side while running for a bus then you've experienced a splenic pucker-up to release more rbc's as required by the exercise.

Almost exactly 20 years later. My folks were on another Mediterranean cruise. Between Naples and Malta she had a gripe in the guts and was stretchered off the ship in Valetta, operated on by a Polish surgeon and repatriated by plane 5 days later as soon as she could walk to a taxi. Meanwhile back at Caisleán Bob, then in Dublin, The Beloved decided that I should go to Malta immediately to succour my aged parents. In those before-Ryanair days, I had to go to a travel agent to book a charter flight and spend a week there.

And 30 years after that, my mother had a final (asserted to be independent of the other two) blockage at the age of 99. And that is what carried her off. ]]

That's a big long tripartite aside to emphasise the importance of intestinal health . . . and the virtues of pinhead oatmeal in achieving that goal. My correspondent M believes in porridge and bought a 1kg packet of pinhead oatmeal for the full authentico roughage experience. When she got home she twigged that she'd have to boil the oats for "30 minutes" in a 3x volume of water. The 30 min was aspirational, and the porridge wasn't cooked for at least an hour. By which time her teeny tiny bedsit was completely fogged up and even the bed felt wet. The cooking had cost more in gas than the oats. So that's how I acquired 980g of pinhead oats.

I have developed a protocol for beating Flahavan's finest into submission. 

1. soak the oats in 2x water for at least 8 hours
2. bring to the boil on the top of the wood-burning stove [fuel cost = zero]
3. allow it to seeth ["blut blut"] for 10 -20 minutes
4. take off the heat and leave overnight
5. add the final 1x of liquid [make that milk for me, ymmv]
6. bring to the boil stirring assiduously to prevent sticking and to break up the glutinous lumps
7. serve forth to eat with more milk [cream if you have it], {a drizzle of golden syrup | soft brown sugar | maple syrup if Canadien} and a spoon.

Most excellent! Start with a cup of oats and you'll have M-F worth of breakfasts bringing cheer to your microbiome.