Pimp your porridge for St Andrew's Day

Today, in case you've missed it, which is entirely possible, is St Andrew's Day, so in celebration of the occasion, I'm doing a Scottish breakfast. I could of course have gone in several directions here. Scotland is arguably the spiritual home of breakfast - Dundee marmalade, Arbroath smokies, Loch Fyne kippers, oatmeal porridge, heather honey, Stornoway black pudding, you name it, and breakfast-wise, the Scots are probably right on it. But today it's freezing outside so there's really only one place to go, and that is porridgeville.

I was reading a funny post by Claire over at the Crumbs blog the other week about how she feels she's a middle-class pariah because she doesn't like porridge. And it's certainly true that the humble oat has made a big comeback in recent years. You can hardly move in the cereal aisle now for variations on the oat-based cereal - rolled oats, oatmeal, oat bran, oats in clusters, oats in flakes, oats in bix (the less said about Oatibix the better- whoever invented that needs a good talking to. Bleuch.), porridge in individual pots with honey/blueberries/raspberries/apples/cinnamon/you name it. And let's  not forget my own childhood favourite Ready-Brek - 'Central Heating For Kids' - which now looks to me uncannily like dandruff. And that's before we even get started on the muesli shelves. But on a cold winter's day, it really has to be back to basics - a steaming bowl of porridge. My grandfather was brought up in the early years of the last century in a West Highland crofting family, and I was regaled from an early age with tales of him being sent off to school (no doubt barefoot...) across the hills with a slice of porridge in his pocket to last him a few days. I have no idea if any of it was true, but what is true is that porridge was, and still is for many, a staple of the Scottish diet.

The basic recipe, as any true Scot will tell you, involves oatmeal rather than rolled 'porridge' oats, salt and water and a bowl of cream on the side. F Marion McNeill, in the wonderful old Scottish book The Book of Breakfasts, tells us that 'a Scot nearly always declines porridge outside of Scotland' whilst also admitting that even here in Scotland, porridge is often not what it was. She blames modern milling and storage methods, and tells us that when she was a child (she was born in Orkney in 1885) the meal was poured into a meal chest and the children were stood on the top and told to tramp it down until it was tightly packed for storage.

She gives this recipe:

"PORRIDGE

oatmeal  salt  water

Allow for each person a breakfastcupful [a wha'?] of water, a handful of oatmeal, and a small saltspoonful of salt. Use fresh spring water, and preferably, home milled-meal, coarsely ground. Bring the water to the boil, and just as it approaches boiling point, add the oatmeal, letting it fall in a steady rain from the left hand whilst you stir it briskly with a spurtle (porridge-stick) or wooden spoon. When the porridge is boiling steadily, draw the pot to the side and put on the lid. Let it cook for 20-30 minutes, according to the quality of the oatmeal. Let it cook for at least ten minutes before you add the salt, which has a tendency to harden the meal and prevent its swelling if added at once. On the other hand, never cook porridge without salt. Ladle straight into cold porringers or soup-plates, and serve with a small individual bowl of rich milk or thin cream. Each spoonful of porridge should be dipped and cooled in the milk or cream before being conveyed to the mouth.

Note: Children often like a layer of sugar, honey, syrup or treacle, or of raw oatmeal. A morsel of butter in the centre of the plate agrees with some digestions better than milk.
Porter, skeachan, and brisk small beer used to be popular accompaniments to porridge.
Porridge may be made with milk or whey instead of water, and with barley meal or wheaten meal instead of oatmeal."

Translation for sassenachs:
Porringer (this one's quite posh)
Skeachan
A spurtle

Now, I think we can make several assumptions here. First up, I'm assuming that most of you don't have the wherewithal to grind your own oatmeal. Or indeed the inclination. I'm also going to hazard a guess that you don't drink porter with your breakfast. I suspect that it is also a bit more difficult to get hold of decent oatmeal in England than it is here, where every supermarket sells oatmeal in different grades.You're looking for coarse or pinhead oatmeal to do it in the traditional way, and you should be able to get it in a health food store if your local supermarket is not forthcoming. Mr Breakfast, regular readers may remember, maintains that steel-cut oats are the absolute best, but they aren't easy to come by in the shops, and if you're going to be as obsessive as him you may need to go online to get them.

Secondly, I think most people are a little less puritanical in their breakfast habits these days. I actually prefer my porridge made with water too, but I think I'm probably a bit of an oddity in this respect and that most people probably use milk, or a mixture of milk and water to make their porridge.

And finally, most people are more than happy to add all sorts of wonderful things to their porridge to make it a little more interesting. When I mentioned to a few people that I was writing this post, I was given some lovely ideas for fancying up your porridge. Here are a few of them:

Alison at Alison's Garden loves porridge for breakfast. As you'll see from her blog, she's outdoors in all weathers, so she starts the day with 'organic jumbo oats with added oat bran, cooked with water, finished with a liberal sprinkling of cinnamon & fresh fruit'. Yum.

Bikelights in the Fruit Bowl has posted her 'super-magic porridge' recipe. I've never heard of adding ground almonds to porridge, but what a great idea - it sounds delicious. I'm sure Ms McNeill would throw up her hands in horror at the thought, but hey. That's progress. Constant process improvement, as they say in the big bad world of business.

For porridge cheats, one of my friends highly recommends Dorset Cereals Proper Gingerbread Porridge. And she's a proper highlander, so I figure she should know her oats from her onions. It has pieces of gingerbread and dates in it and it does sound good - ginger is always great for warming you up on a cold morning and the combination of dates and ginger sounds like a winner to me. Being a cheapskate, I'm wondering how this could be done in a homemade way, without having to actually, you know, make  gingerbread. Ginger essence? Ground ginger? Hmm. I feel an experiment coming on.

Another Scot, Rachael at Tales from the Village, tells me that she likes hers made with milk and brown sugar, which is exactly how my Scottish mum used to make mine when I was little. I loved the way the brown sugar went all fudgy and would eat my way carefully around the brown blob in the middle so that I could save that bit for last.

Nowadays, we usually have ours fairly simply. Firstborn likes a banana thinly sliced into his as it's cooking, so that it melts away into the porridge and just leaves it all 'bananary'. He then likes a wee swirl of maple syrup on top (and cream if  he can get away with it). As an alternative, he'll accept a handful of raisins thrown in as the porridge is cooking.

So, how do you eat yours? However you like it, Ith gu leòir, and Happy St Andrews Day!

The fruit refusenik

My oldest son does not like fruit. This morning I asked him to write me a list of fruit he would willingly eat if I bought it for him. Here is his list:

I let him have tomatoes because technically he's right, and I was quite impressed that he knew this (he's 6). Also, it would be an even more woeful list without tomatoes.

He'll also countenance various other fruits in puddings or smoothies, but he would no sooner pluck an apple from the fruit bowl than saw his own arm off. I know I don't have it nearly as bad as some parents - he would eat spinach pasta until it was coming out of his ears, and he orders fish and chips at school, eats the fish and leaves the chips. But I still mourn the days when he used to eat blueberries as if they were sweeties.

I've found two ways to get round his aversion. The first is to melt a bar of chocolate in the microwave, mix it with a pot of custard, chop up bits of various fruits (bananas and strawberries and  mangoes, obviously, but he might just be persuaded to eat a cherry or a raspberry this way), decant the custard into little ramekins and serve it up as 'chocolate fondue'. I'm not in the habit of serving custard for breakfast though, and I can think of better ways to start my day than peeling mangoes and pineapples.

The second is bircher muesli. Now, my son and heir is mad for porridge, and bircher muesli is not a million miles from porridge I guess, but he absolutely laps this up. There are many ways to skin the bircher cat. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall likes dried apricots on his, and Gordon Ramsay uses milk rather than OJ, and adds toasted walnuts (yum). Here's my son's favourite though:

I usually make up a big jar of muesli base, mostly rolled oats, with seeds added (sunflower/pumpkin is my usual, but you could add sesame or linseeds, or nuts if you prefer), and dried fruit (I use raisins and dates, but again, whatever floats your boat). If you're feeling really lazy, Waitrose do bags of bircher muesli base. It contains dried raspberries, which would be viewed with great suspicion by my son, so I haven't tried it, and it's really no hassle to make up a jar of the base once every few weeks.

He usually takes this to school for his morning snack rather than having it for breakfast, so I decant a snack sized portion of the base into a container, and then grate in an apple, and squeeze an orange into it. Mix it up, dollop of natural yogurt and a squirt of honey and it's good to go. If you want it for breakfast, you can make it up the night before, then just add the yogurt and honey in the morning. In fact, you should make it up the night before, as the juice is supposed to soak into the oats for a while.

I will admit that it probably doesn't look quite as lovely as it might once it's swilled about in his school bag for an hour or so, and he's already told me that his classmates look upon him in horror when he tucks in, so I'm just delighted that he's still willing to take this to school for a snack, and hasn't caved in to cheese-string based peer pressure. I dare say it's only a matter of time.

If you too have a fruit refusenik, give it a go.  Or else tell me what you do to up the vitamin C in your child's diet.

Choices

I haven't forgotten about the pancakes, but I've been watching this TED talk talk by Barry Schwartz today,  and it reminded me of an article I read many years ago about a Japanese academic who went to work in the US and was utterly baffled by the number of choices he was constantly being asked to make about even the most minor thing. In Japan, he said, if you were a guest in someone's home, they would offer you a drink, you would accept, and they would bring you a drink. In the US,  however, he would go to his host's house where they would ask him if he wanted a drink. If he agreed, they'd ask him if he wanted tea, or coffee, or juice, or maybe something stronger?  Coffee. White, or black? With sugar or without sugar? Is instant OK, or shall I make a pot of real coffee? Would you prefer a cup or a mug? Would you like a cookie with that? Or not? He felt that the Americans (and of course it's not just the Americans - we're exactly the same in this country) wasted huge amounts of time and energy in making and offering these choices. It's a very zen way of looking at things, but I know what he means.

Our local supermarket has recently been extended. And when I say 'extended', it's about 3 or 4 times as big as it was before. The cashier told me that she keeps finding exhausted pensioners at the tills. They've probably been in there for weeks trying to find the teabags. Honestly, you need a good stock of energy bars before you cross the threshold.

So, bigger and better, or too much choice? I thought I'd have a wee shufty at the breakfast cereal aisle,  with Barry Schwartz's words ringing in my ears, and specifically at the muesli  section of the aisle. When I was a nipper, Alpen was a relatively new product on the British market, all 'Swiss' and 'healthy' with its snowy mountain on the brown box. If you wanted muesli, it was pretty much Alpen or hie thee to a health food store and buy what the unreconstructed referred to as 'rabbit food'. Alpen came in brown (which of course we now recognise as 'piled full of sugar and actually not all that healthy after all'). No blue low sugar variants, no granola, no snack-n-go breakfast replacement bars. So what do we have now? 34 different varieties of muesli is what.  And in their online store there are 49 different mueslis. And that's before you even get to the cornflakes or any of the hundreds of other cereals. If you type in 'breakfast cereals' you get a whopping 199 choices.

I'm really not sure how I feel about it all, in terms of quality of life. While it's lovely to be able to try new things and to be able to find alternatives if what you really want isn't available, I often feel paralysed by indecision, and I'm sure the shopping takes twice as long as it needs to. A simpler approach to life is very appealing. Think how much time we would free up if we weren't agonising over which breakfast cereal to choose, which washing powder/liquid/tab to choose, which kind of seeded bread (rich and roasted? Light and nutty?) to choose.

"Through return to simple living comes control of desires. In control of desires, stillness is attained. In stillness the world is restored."

Lao Tzu 

There now, I bet you weren't counting on Chinese philospophy with your breakfast blog.