I can’t believe I’m capable of such a monumental mess up. Me, the porridge master! You name the grain, I can cook it into the creamiest, most nutrient-rich and delicious bowl of porridge you’ve ever clapped eyes on, and top it with a perfectly curated assortment of seasonal berries, nut butters, protein-optimising seed combos, raw cacao blends, toasted coconut, local honey and edible flowers. So how, I ask you, how did this happen?
It all started when I was making the week’s batch of steel cut oats – a classic. I opened the fridge to grab the milk, and there it was: a tub of bio-dynamic cream, due to expire in a few days. Well, we won’t be using that for anything else, I thought, and decided to add some to the porridge as a treat. Little did I know (actually, I did know – I just forgot) that the bio-dynamic sour cream looks exactly like the regular cream we buy, and doesn’t smell that much funkier. So, yeah, I poured a cup of sour cream into the porridge, thereby ruining the whole pot that I’d just lovingly tended for 90 minutes.
And this after we spent all that time and money on kitchen design and renovations. Melbourne, I’m ashamed to call myself one of your own… I simply don’t deserve to have a chef-quality kitchen. If I had any honour, now would be the time to fall upon my own sword, or at least my beechwood spurtle. I have failed. I feel a bit guilty considering I have a wonderful kitchen renovation, probably the best kitchen in the street.
Clarissa keeps telling me that it’s fine, it’s edible, I’m being melodramatic… it’s just like a sour cream chocolate cake, she said. A bit weird in porridge form, but nothing to kick up a stink about. It’s true that adding a handful of cacao and a generous drizzle of honey helped matters considerably, with the cacao drawing out the earthy flavour of the oats and the honey neutralising the unwanted tang of the sour cream. But that’s not the point. It should never have come to this.