Monday morning – Oatal Eclipse at the Start

The Mean Bean Challenge is relatively straightforward to describe. From Monday 27 March to Friday 31 March 2017, here is a complete list of what I am allowed to consume:

·         Oats

·         Rice

·         Beans

·         Water

For comparison, here is a selection of things that aren’t on that list and therefore I cannot consume during this week:

·         The tomato sauce that baked beans come in

·         Sugar

·         Herbs and seasoning

·         Milk

·         Cheese

·         Tea / coffee / fruit juice / Coke / basically any other vaguely interesting liquid

·         People

·         Dirt

As you can imagine, some things on the second list will be harder to avoid than others. I do love dirt.

The day started fairly well – in advance of my first meal, I joined an event on Facebook for participants and subsequently discovered that I’m allowed to add salt to food, which is just as well. As far as I’m concerned, porridge without salt is essentially wallpaper paste, and as everybody knows there’s nothing quite as nutritious and satisfying to eat in the morning as salted wallpaper paste.

If I’m honest, going into the week breakfast is the meal I’m generally dreading the most. Rice and beans as a meal is unexciting but basically fine, whereas porridge is essentially just distilled disappointment in a bowl - a pile of lumpy goodness staring up at you and letting you know that hash browns, scrambled eggs and baked beans could have been an option, but instead you decided to squander a third of your meals for the day on an insult to cement.

Since this is for all intents and purposes a food blog (which I always suspected would be my calling ever since Year 1 when we were asked to design a sandwich and I created the groundbreaking “lettuce sandwich”), I’ve decided to include some recipes in these posts. In particular if you want to cook along with me, these should hopefully make these intricate and complex dishes a little more accessible.

Porridge a la Monday:

Spoon, bowl and tablecloth not included.

Ingredients: porridge oats, water, disappointment.

1.       Check the back of the packet of porridge oats for the correct ratio of oats to water.

2.       Remember that the last time you made porridge it was a hideously soggy watery mess, and consider just eating porridge oats by themselves.

3.       Eat a small spoonful of porridge oats. Realise that they essentially taste like sawdust but without the flavouring.

4.       Briefly reconsider all life choices made up until this point.

5.       Compromise by mixing the oats with half the recommended amount of cold water in a bowl.

6.       Microwave the bowl for two minutes.

7.       Be briefly surprised that the porridge is done already, before realising that using half the amount of water probably cuts cooking time in half.

8.       Look at the delicious bland sludge in the bowl and suddenly have an urge to put up wallpaper.

9.       Take a picture of your food.

10.   Take a bite.

11.   Wonder whether you should have put the word “food” in inverted commas in step 9.

12.   Write a very detailed recipe of everything you’ve done so far in the day to avoid having to actually eat what you’ve created.

13.   Add a thirteenth step to delay this further.

14.   Admit that a fourteenth step is pushing it too far.

15.   But a fifteenth is probably fine.

16.   Fine, I’ll eat it. Honestly, are you my mother or something?

I decided not to add salt to the porridge today. From experience this does make it slightly nicer, so I figured this would be a nice treat to enhance the experience towards the end of the week when I’m flagging, in the same way as a nice biting stick makes somebody slightly happier if they’re trying to hack their own leg off with a rusty machete.

I did manage to eat the entire bowl without adding salt, although I did write this sentence before actually managing that, and only managed to push through because I didn’t want to have lied to you in my very first post.

It wasn’t an entirely bad experience. At least I now know that if I run out of food in the future I can just mash some Amazon packaging that’s been left in the rain.

Note: As part of myMean Bean challenge I will be writing about my experiences each day – the more money raised, the more I write. At the time of writing, people have generously donated £255, which means I’m aiming at 1,475 words per day (excluding the ones in this explanatory paragraph). This will hopefully come in two posts, one in the morning and one in the evening. If you would like these posts to get even longer, and support the excellent work of Tearfund at the same time, please click here.