It is not easy to cook oat grits.  They take a lot longer than rolled oats and if not done exactly to the recipe I’m about to give you, will almost inevitably stick to the pot badly and may also froth over and mess the stove.  Here’s how to cook them.  Coarsely grind (like corn meal) your whole oats until you have one cup of oat grits.  Bring exactly four cups of water (no salt) to a very hard boil at your highest heat.  You may add a handful of raisins.  Light or turn on a second, small-sized burner on the stove and set it as low as possible.  Into the fast boiling water, slowly pour the ground oats, stirring continuously.  Take about 30 seconds to pour it all or you’ll make clumps.  Keep on the high heat until the water again boils vigorously.  Suddenly, the mixture will begin rising in the pot and will try to pour all over the stove.  This means it is all at boiling temperature again.  Quickly move the pot to the low burner; that instantly stops the frothing.  Then cover.  Let the porridge cook for 30 minutes, stirring once or twice to prevent sticking.  Then, keeping it covered, turn off the heat.  They can be eaten at this point but I think it is better to let the oats finish soaking on the stove for at least two to four hours.  Then reheat in a double boiler, or warm in a microwave.

We usually start a pot of oats at bedtime for the next morning.  See why people prefer the convenience of using rolled oats?  But once you’ve eaten oats made right, you’ll never prefer the flavor of rolled oats again.  And if the human body has any natural method of assaying nutritional content, it is flavor.

Nutritionally, millet is almost the same story as oats.  Millet seed is protected by a very hard hull.  Cooking unhulled millet is almost impossible.  After hours of boiling the small round seeds will still be hard and the hulls remain entirely indigestible.  Worse, the half-round hulls (they split eventually) stick in your teeth.  But prehulled millet, sitting in the sack for weeks and months, loses a lot of nutrition and tastes very second-rate compared to freshly-hulled millet.  It is possible to buy unhulled millet, usually by special order from the health food distributor—­if you’ll take a whole sack.  Millet can be hulled at home in small batches.  Here’s how we figured out how to do it.  There probably are better ways.

Using a cheap steel-burr flour mill, set the burrs just far enough apart that the seed is ground to grits, but not flour.  This pops the hulls loose.  An old mill with worn-out burrs works great for this job.  Then you have to get some hand seed cleaning screens just large enough to pass the grits but not pass the hulls (most of them).  Window screen or other hardware cloths won’t work.  Seed cleaning screens come in increments of 1/128 inch; we use a 6/64” round screen.  Other batches of millet might work better with a screen one step larger or smaller.  It will take you a little ingenuity to find hand-held screens.  They’re used by seed companies and farmers to clean small batches of seed for inspection and are usually about one square foot in size with a quality wooden frame.  Larger frames made of the same screening material are used in big seed cleaning machines. (The hulls could also be winnowed out by repeatedly pouring the grit/hulls mixture back and forth between two buckets in a gentle breeze.)