Millet

You want hulled millet, the tiny pale gold beads sold in most bulk sections (not birdseed, which is unhulled). Give it a 30 second rinse in a fine-mesh strainer before cooking to wash off the dusty, slightly bitter coating. Millet carries more natural oil than rice, so it goes rancid faster than you'd think: airtight in the pantry it's good for a couple months, but the freezer buys you close to a year. If it smells musty or oily instead of faintly nutty, toss it.

Millet is the choose-your-own-texture grain: a 1:2 water ratio gets you fluffy grains like couscous, while 1:3 with regular stirring turns it into a creamy porridge that stands in for polenta. The two moves that matter are toasting it 2–3 minutes in a dry pan before the water goes in (it wakes up the nutty flavor) and then leaving the lid alone. Stirring fluffy millet breaks the grains and releases starch, and that is how you cook millet into wallpaper paste by accident. I toast every batch, no exceptions, because untoasted millet tastes like almost nothing.