Lady Lunchalot

Years ago, I used to skip breakfast every morning. I don’t know why I did - not organised enough I guess. I stopped as soon as I realised that I was doing myself out of 30 per cent of the meals I was entitled to eat in my lifetime. There’s no way I’m going to pass on a legitimate excuse for a meal!

I guess that’s the problem with breakfast. Most people think it’s impossible to whip up something nutritious and tasty while also juggling a hairdryer, a pack of screaming children and a hot iron. I mean, I didn’t even have the screaming kids, and the only type of iron I ever encounter is the kind found in a spinach pie or a good slab of wagyu beef, and I still found it a challenge.

That was, until I discovered porridge.

Well, I guess I re-discovered it. My first foray into the wonderful world of porridge was led by my culinarily-challenged dad, who had an uncanny knack of making porridge closely resemble a bowl of two-week old wallpaper paste.

But I redicovered porridge through O, who loves a steaming hot bowl of porridge first thing in the morning.

Like all the best things in life, porridge is a dish best cooked slowly with lots of the bad things in life. Like full cream milk. And lashings of cream, like in an Enid Blyton story. However in the interests of my waistline, and to save on a few precious moments in the morning, I usually make mine with low fat milk and nuke it in the microwave for a few minutes.

Sacrilegious, I know.

The most important thing about cooking porridge is to get the oat/milk ratio right. Too much milk and the porridge is too runny and thin (like the porridge in the photo - I overdid it with the milk). Too little and it gets gluggy and, well, gross - like the way my dad used to make it. The best porridge consistency is enough milk to make it soft and creamy, with lots of comforting porridgey curds.

As for flavouring the porridge, nothing beats a sprinkle of cinnamon, a hint of nutmeg, a dusting of brown sugar and a banana. Unless of course it’s real Canadian maple syrup, as supplied by the lovely K & T.

I can understand why Goldilocks was willing to take on three bears to get a bowl of the good stuff.

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Vaguely relevant aside:

Even though I am largely politically ambivalent, for some reason I have always thought there was a striking resemblance between Alexander Downer (Australia’s Foreigh Minister) and a bowl of porridge with two raisins floating on top. What do you think?