Vegetarian bento #5 - Hangover bento

As a devotee of porridge in all its forms, I have been wanting to try this recipe for ages, and the UK Bank Holiday weekend provided an excellent opportunity.

I'm sure anyone who is even remotely interesting has experienced what I generally refer to as a cumulative hangover. It's what occurs when you start partying on Thursday night, average roughly three hours sleep each night and go clubbing with people who buy beer in jugs, and keep going until the wee hours of Tuesday morning.

Following on of these fun binges, I generally feel like consuming fewer calories and concocting less complicated lunches than normal. This usually means I end up hanging over a bowl of soup, but today, in honour of my new food flask, I decided to try rice porridge, as described by Maki Otoh (my bento guru!) .

This bento takes a bit of planning, but the effort involved is minimal and you can wander off and leave it while you drink water/stand under a cold shower/curse the world's wine-producing nations/gulp Berocca.

For my bento, I put 60g sushi rice and two tbsp dried adzuki beans into a pint jug and filled it to the top with water, then left it overnight to soak. 

In the morning, I crawled out of bed, tipped the whole lot into a pan with a good pinch of salt and brought it to the boil while making myself a cup of tea. Then I turned the heat right down and crawled back to bed. When it was time for me to shower (about 40mins later) I checked the pan to make sure it hadn’t dried out (you want this to be the consistency of breakfast porridge) and hopped in the shower. 

When I was ready to leave the house, I tipped half the mixture into my thermos, half into a takeaway box for the freezer, grabbed some toppings (chopped green onions, sesame salt, a pickled plum) and headed to the office. By lunchtime, it was just the right kind of warm – it’s also filling and comforting and totally guilt free.

In praise of porridge

I love porridge. I’d have it for breakfast every day if it weren’t for the perplexed stares I draw when cooking up oats in summer! So, when the warm weather hits I switch to fruits and yoghurt, but as soon as the air takes a cold turn, I reach for my oats!

I’m quite a purist about my porridge, and quite particular about how it is prepared. No microwave oats for me, and don’t even think about mentioning the awful, tasteless Ready Brek in my presence (sort of like baby food, but worse).

I favour organic oats and at the moment I’m using Flanahan’s, although sometimes I like the big, chunky oats Sainsbury’s does. However, my ideal texture is somewhere between the two so I might try combining them at some point – stay tuned for that experiment.

Step one for me is soaking the oats: 30g is about enough for me and I put them in a cup of water over night. In the morning, I pour the whole lot into a pan with a pinch of salt and let it cook on a very low heat until it reaches my desired consistency. I like my porridge thick, so it takes at least 15 minutes. 

Every five minutes or so I give it a good stir with a wooden spatula ("materials are everything") and when it is ready I tip it into my bowl. 

By now, you will have noticed the total absence of milk from this procedure: blame my Scottish ancestry. Occasionally, when I am out, I have to settle for porridge made with milk, but I never make it at home. I think it was Clarissa Dickson-Wright who described porridge made with milk as “puppy sick”. She isn’t wrong, you know. By all means pour a bit of milk or cream onto your porridge once it is in the bowl, but don’t insult your oats by poaching them in it.

Despite my aversion to milk, I do like to top my porridge with something: soft fruits, dried fruits, banana, peanut butter, grated apple, cinnamon, or some combination thereof. For breakfast this morning, I sprinkled some figs with brown sugar (I know some people are horrified by sugar, but one teaspoon won't hurt, even when you are trying to lose weight) and baked them until it the sugar bubbled:

And then put them on top of my porridge:

Delicious, filling and healthy :)