Winter Breakfast: How to Make Old-Fashioned Porridge
Winter has well and truly begun, and while I am not generally a breakfast person, there is nothing like a belly full of warm, creamy porridge on a cold morning. I do not have a microwave, so I make porridge like my grannies did, on the stove, with locally grown rolled oats.
This porridge begins the night before when I soak the oats overnight. I add half a cup of water and half a cup of milk to half a cup of oats. So easy to remember! My kind of recipe. This is the amount for one person. I soak it in my bowl, in the fridge, with a plate inverted on the top.
In the morning I pour the whole lot into a small saucepan and add a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon. I warm it slowly and stir it constantly until it is the consistency I prefer. Creamy, not too dry. This takes all of five minutes. It doesn't take much cooking because of the long soaking, and the soaking also makes the oats more digestible.
Then pour it back into my bowl and top it with fruit. This week, stewed greengages that I picked from my friend Tanya's tree in the summertime. Summer goodness in the middle of winter. Yum.
Pro tip: scrape out the saucepan with a spatula. Do not waste any of that porridgy goodness. You know your grannies would have done this! Then soak the saucepan in water. Porridge turns to cement when dry.
Do you make porridge in the winter? Maybe you are in the Northern hemisphere and it is too hot for porridge right now. Now is a good time to be planning to preserve all the summer fruit which will be coming on soon, so you will have fruit for your porridge come winter. I know I will run out of fruit this winter, quite soon. Note to self - preserve, preserve, preserve this coming summer. What I do have is vast amounts of jam to use up. Not quite as healthy on porridge, but very yum!
Comments
cheers Kate
Kate, that is good to know, that rolled oats can be cooked up without soaking. I have never really been game to try. Mmm, prunes, it's been ages since I ate a prune. I really like prunes! It looks like you really know how to dress up porridge:) Paul plus Posy likes golden syrup on porridge. Do you use the Kindred oats? I am loving them. They make such creamy porridge. Apparently they don't heat treat them, only roll them, which makes them less shelf stable but more delicious:)
Cheers Kate
I may try you methods with the slow oats, cooked the long soak method.
Lucinda
When I was a child it was Quaker oats, and milk, and brown sugar. When my own children were young we'd get "bear mush" through our co-op, which was a whole grain cream of wheat. And when the children got older and people were eating breakfast in shifts before going off to school or work, I would put 7-grain cereal in the slow cooker at night from which they could scoop out a bowlful in the morning.
One of my friends grew up on cornmeal mush, served by her Italian mother with canned milk poured over. I tried that on my children too, she raved about it so, but I concluded that you'd have to grow up on it to appreciate it :-)
I really love your method, which is perfect for one person, and both very homey and civilized. I want to be more mindful of my eating, and starting my elegant breakfast the night before would facilitate that. In our climate it's appropriate any season of the year. Thank you, Jo!
Long time no write -- hope you are going well!
I love making porridge, and use powdered soy milk because it's cheap, healthy, and reduces the amount of packaging we consume. It tastes great.
A great option for fruit preservation is drying. I dried a couple of kilos of strawberries in summer, using an old screen door and a shower window. Oh me oh my -- they are fantastic. They taste like strawberry jam without the sugar. Dried fruits go great in porridge.
Been busy at my place, but don't have time to write about it now ;-)
Cheers, Angus
Lucinda, I love your antipathy for foods touching other foods. My son had years of that. It was very annoying at the time but now I can look back and laugh. Clearly you are a purist. I like chaos in life and breakfast:)
Gretchen Joanna, mush is a wonderful word for porridge. Bear mush is even better! Using the slow cooker for porridge for a large family is brilliant! I shall do that if I ever start an orphange:)
Angus, I dried so much fruit over the summer, kilos and kilos of plums, peaches and apricots. I was hoping for it to last me well into the winter, but we scoffed it all by late autumn as we are piggies:) Dried strawberries sound wonderful! Will have to give that a go.
Hope all your urban homestead projects are coming along nicely. Would love to see some more updates:)
Linda in NZ
Anna, ah, so that's what the golden syrup is for - glue!!
I remember one time in Hobart that I was so tired with pregnancy carrying number three that I mixed up the ginger and garlic jars and we had garlic porridge. Made sure never to buy those two in the same style jars again. 😀
Best wishes
Jen now in Qld