As the weather gets cooler, I change to eating oatmeal for breakfast. I didn’t grow up eating oatmeal, so I’ve been trying to teach myself how to cook it. I like a very creamy oatmeal, often how I get at a restaurant. However, when I made it at home, my oatmeal wasn’t nearly as good. Now, after a few years of making it, I feel like I have the perfect recipe for me.

I finally figured out that my main issue in previous years was that I was trying to cook too little oatmeal. I only wanted to eat about 1 cup of cooked oatmeal. And you get that from cooking maybe 1/2 cup of oats. Oatmeal seems to cook best when you cook at least one cup of oats. I had thought that I was wasting a lot of oatmeal because I couldn’t eat that much. My breakthrough this year was that I found I could keep the leftovers in the frig and reheat them the next day and they tasted just as good as when I made them. Now that I know I’m not wasting oatmeal, here’s the recipe I follow:

1 cup water
2 cups milk
1 cup oatmeal
tablespoon of vanilla (I don’t measure, but just pour some in)
pat of butter

Usually, if I wake up around 4am, I’ll put all of these things on as low as I can go and cover the pot. It’s usually done by 5am when I get up. The drawback is that the bottom will burn and stick to the pot. If I start things around 5am and can get myself to get out of bed to stir it every 15 minutes or so, it usually doesn’t stick. Keeping the stove as low as possible is needed to prevent the oatmeal from spilling over. Sometimes, it still spills over, but I’m ok with that.

I take a bowl of it to eat and put the rest in the frig. The next day, I drop the leftovers in the pot. Add some milk and a little more vanilla and heat until creamy. Tastes just like the previous day.

I like to top it off with some blueberries and some chocolate chips.