oatmeal with strawberries, pecans, raisins

It takes longer to assemble this than it does cooking it 3.5 minutes in the microwave.

That inconvenience can be overcome by preparing ingredients in advance in a large batch for future use incrementally. And that is very convenient. But it must be used in reasonable time due to evanescence of ingredients. 

Oatmeal is terrible without salt.

Oatmeal is improved with brown sugar.

I really like raisins in oatmeal. The giant multicolored jumbo kind, not the rinkey-dink regular black kind.

And pecans add a fantastic crunchy texture to boring gray mush.

Oatmeal is nothing without the body that butter contributes. For oatmeal has no fat of its own.

And cold whole milk is a very nice contrast between temperatures. 

Cinnamon contributes a faintly exotic element.

So what could be better than all that? 

Berries! Or fruit. Colorado peaches are ripe at the moment and their window is quite small.

This is 1/2 cup dry oatmeal with nearly 2 cups of water. And that's 10X more than you get in those ridiculous packages of instant rolled, steel cut, steamed, instant oatmeal flavored with dehydrated marshmallows. There is no comparison. Those things are for people who don't know what food should be. Even for camping this prepared in advance is much better. I shouldn't have even mentioned those things. (I've had a few packages of those sitting in my pantry forlornly for over ten years. There is simply no point to their existence. But there they are. How did they even get in there? It must have been an unseen enemy. Maybe it was that time a malevolent being took over my body and did things I wouldn't approve.)