A spurtle is just a stick, really — a thin rod of wood you stir porridge with so you don't bruise the oats into glue. Salt goes in early, that's the only rule I keep. And Mary's Meals have been ladling the stuff out since 2002, starting with 200 children in Malawi, on the arithmetic that a year of school meals for one child costs about the price of a few bags of good coffee. Cheap grain, hot, before anyone's properly awake. My kind of cooking.
Rosa, there's a world championship for this in Carrbridge and the trophy is a golden spurtle, which means somewhere out there a person has a stirring stick on their mantel next to the family photos. Every sport I've ever played, nobody hands you the bat afterward!
Oats put up with ground wheat won't touch — cool, wet, thin and sour soil, short summers. That's the whole reason the north and the uplands ate them. Follow the oat fields and you're mostly following rain.