Sarah Downton Beads and Jewellery

Thursday morning

There’s good news and bad news…….the good news first…..It seems to be warming up! Yesterday my kiln showed a temperature of 9 deg C when I turned it on at 10am, not bad considering it was a toe freezing minus 1 the other week, and try as I may I just couldn’t work fast, which was bad ‘cos I desperately wanted to go back indoors. The bad news is that they predict cold weather sweeping in from the east, wow, I managed to listen for a couple of seconds to a weather forecast, that’s a first. I’m sure I’ve written about this before, I try so hard to listen to weather forecasts, I really do, I wanna know what’s going on,  but even though I’m stood/sat/balanced on one leg watching and listening intently, I find I only catch the first couple of comments then find myself in a mind stupor watching him/her waving their arms about as if to sing ‘the wheels on the bus, then I awake to the subtitle ‘Thursday PM’ and realise I’ve just missed Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday……..for the 1000th time.

So to prepare me for the possible icy gales that will start this afternoon I have stoked my internal boiler and fuelled up on my usual porridge, although this is not just ordinary porridge, this is Sarah Downton’s chocolate porridge. After my fiasco with the cinnamon porridge of a couple of years ago I’ve shied away from spiking my porridge in any but the traditional ways, you know, salt and a bit of sugar, well I always use salt now, but also have it occasionally with little extras like soft dark brown sugar, golden syrup, maple syrup, chocolate sauce  or caramel de leche. Today I felt inspired by Jamie Oliver’s list of porridge variations in his new book, Ministry of Food, and decided to try my hand at my version, but using cocoa powder rather than sacrificing my Divine fair trade chocolate bar and using Nigella’s ‘Chocolate Rice Pudding’ recipe from ‘Feast’ to work out how to do this, after all, cooking dry oats is probably not that different from cooking rice pudding.

Success, it was really yummy, and I have some to put in the fridge for tomorrow as I always do a double batch. It was may not be so sweet as I tried not to overdo the sugar, and maybe not buttery, I’m guessing Jamie’s is buttery from the chocolate bar, but that could be easily tweaked if desired by adding some butter.

here’s my recipe for 2 servings:

1/2 cup rolled oats,  1/2 cup milk,  1 cup water,  1 twist sea salt – my normal recipe but with less salt.

1 tbsp Cocoa powder,  preferably Green and Blacks,  1 1/2 tsp sugar,  1/2 tsp real vanilla extract.

Just bung all these ingredients into a saucepan and bring to the boil, whisking to disperse the cocoa powder and stop lumps. When the coca is mixed in you can revert to using a wooden spoon, but not one you’ve been using for stir-fries or it will taste of garlic and chocolate (maybe not a bad combo actually). Bring to the boil and simmer for 7 minutes. Serve. Oh yum, you could probably add cream to this at the end if you felt really naughty.

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