Tuesday 22 January 2013

Gingerbread porridge



I have just come off deadline for a hideously complicated piece about mackerel. The research on anything to do with fish quotas is almost enough to drive me to a drug habit (JOKING). So I'm indulging myself with something blissfully easy to write about, something comforting, that I hope you will find useful.

Porridge. We all know how healthy it is. Rich in fibre, lowers your cholesterol, makes you strong and gives you a glow etc.

However.

I am always STARVING five minutes after eating it and I have a bit of a guilt trip going over porridge in that I feel it should be made with steel cut pinhead oatmeal and stirred for one hundred hours and eaten with almost nothing, bar a grimace.

I do lighten up occasionally and use jumbo oats and semi skimmed milk and water and cook it on the hob with my spurtle (NEVER NEVER NEVER in the microwave) and then flood it with sliced fruit and maple syrup, but in my Catholic guilt-ridden heart, I know I am sinning.

Thus I hardly eat porridge which is stupid. Like not letting yourself buy cut up fruit because you should cut it up yourself and therefore never eating fruit (not relevant to me but you know what I mean).

This morning, as I was wafting round Waitrose and taking my commission for my mackerel piece and slightly panicking as I do before I start to write any piece (I can't do it I CAN'T DO IT), I spied something. Dorset Cereals Gingerbread Porridge. In the packet are premeasured and sealed daily sachets (so wasteful!). It had stuff added to it to make it tasty (so indulgent!) and it recommended you do it in the microwave (shocking!).

I hadn't had breakfast.
I'd had to dig the car out of the snow that morning.
I had been coerced into buying my child Smarties (I don't buy Nestle products usually).
I had a hideously difficult piece to write on mackerel.
So I bought it.

I came home and made it - in the microwave - and ate it with a dollop of nut butter (to up the protein) and it was DELICIOUS. I am still going on it six hours later (bar the handful of nuts and an apple that I ate an hour ago but that was more out of deadline avoidance than hunger).

Am now going to eat this every day. Every day.

3 comments:

Fiona Hughes said...

I am going to buy this. Thank you.

Unknown said...

I'm going to buy it too! When I was a student I had porridge for breakfast for a year. A year spent trying not to gag over it. Then one morning I suddenly realized something. If I didn't like it, I could stop! What a relevation! Now I make porridge occationaly, but always with rasins or something else nice. And I also go stark raving mad with hunger-pangs not long after eating. I had a porridge relapse some years back, and an hour after eating it, I would run around the office screaming for meat!

Annalisa Barbieri said...

That did make me laugh. I don't know if it's the nut butter I dollop on but this really - thus far at least - keeps me going.

I totally get the craving for protein. Me too.