Oatmeal is a great staple, but served as a hot cereal, I get tired of it quick. A lot of granolas seem to go rancid once they get exposed to air, must be the nut oils and such. I have yet to eat a stale bowl of Grape Nuts. I can eat it more often than oatmeal.

Of course, one of my best recipes is for baked oatmeal. It is probably the best way to eat oatmeal. Here's the recipe:

Big Ben’s Baked Oatmeal

Usually when you tell most folks oatmeal is the main course for breakfast, especially up at camp, they tend to get a bit disappointed. However, this oatmeal recipe is not a porridge. It is a rich, hearty quickbread that will remind them of an oatmeal cookie, only better.

½ cup sugar
½ cup brown sugar or molasses or sorgum syrup
2 eggs
1/2 cup oil
1 cup milk
3 cups quick cooking oats
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1 lb raisins or other unsweetened fruit
1 cup chopped walnuts or almonds
1/2 cup brown sugar

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a medium bowl, combine first five ingredients. Add next three ingredients and mix well. Mix in fruit and nuts. Pour into ungreased pan. Sprinkle brown sugar over top, and any desired spices. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour, when toothpick inserted in middle comes out dry.

Wheat berries (hard red winter wheat). It stores for a couple of thousand years, give or take, and tastes great with honey.

For a variety, you can have it with that Spam you have stored away (without the honey).

Could put those wheat berries through the mill once and make zoom cereal.

Not sure if the Spam will last as long as the wheat would. But after a hundred years, I don't suppose it would matter much to any of us here.

Sure, and if you have a mill, you will have wheat for your breads, too.

It also works whole in soups and stews.

I do so miss living in eastern Washington. Ready access to all the wheat, barley, lentils, peas and garbanzos I could want for pennies on the pound. Just had to pull up to the silo at harvest time and let em dump it right into the back of the pickup. Take it home, transfer it to pails and bags, and in one season you would have staples for a decade.

A lot of this thread has been about oatmeal, but we have overlooked a related product - acorns and acorn mush. Acorns were the staple for prehistoric Californians, who ate it morning, noon, and night. There are a lot of ornamental acorns in my neighborhood and every year the acorns drop, remaining unharvested.

The problem is, we have lost the technology for leaching the tannins out (well,maybe Blast knows), and that is extremely necessary. When you do that, I understand you have something that tastes like - oatmeal!

But it is dirt cheap. After all, acorns do grow on trees.....

You mean, the ancient Californians knew how to do it, but we don't, and can't even figure it out?

I didn't phrase that very well....Actually, it apparently is pretty straightforward. Women shell the acorns, pound the meat into a mush, and soak and rinse,often more than once, to leach out the tannic acid. It takes a lot of time and attention.

Men can't do this. They have to hunt deer and fish for the evening meal.....

and make beer, with all the other cereal stuff.