Tuesday morning – Porridge-ards Almanack

Day 2, and the day so far has actually started relatively positively. Following yesterday’s post and the first day of low calories and dull food, I went to bed feeling slightly hungry. Not the “I need to eat something or I’m going to die” type of hunger, but very much the “You know what? I could really go for a biscuit or a packet of crisps or a 5-course meal right now” type of hunger.

I probably wasn’t quite as hungry as I thought, though, because I woke up this morning and didn’t feel particularly hungry at all. Perhaps my body ate some of itself in the night – I checked and I still have all my limbs so it wasn’t a massively oversized meal, but it might have taken some of the unused stuff hanging out in the part of the brain where I make sense and don’t use overlong sentences which go on for a while but don’t end in a particularly sensible.

Or perhaps my brain (or at least what was left of it) had extrapolated from yesterday’s breakfast what today’s breakfast was going to be and had decided it would prefer to stay out of the whole proceedings.

Tuesday Porridge

Ingredients: porridge oats, water, a keen sense of dread.

One of the hardest parts of this recipe is getting the calligraphy right.

1)      Decide that you’re not going to put yourself through eating an entire dull bowl of porridge and so opt for pouring fewer oats into the bowl.

2)      Accidentally tip the packet too far and discover you’ve poured exactly the same amount of oats as last time. (Down to the oat, I counted).

3)      Consider putting some oats back before deciding that’s too much effort.

4)      Redress the balance by adding even less water than yesterday.

5)      Cook the porridge in the microwave for 2 minutes.

6)      Consider cooking it for another hour in the hope that it will disintegrate and you can get all the calories just by breathing in the fumes of the burnt wreckage of what used to be a kitchen.

7)      Realise that burnt plastic is not one of the foods allowed on the list and so step 6 would probably invalidate the challenge.

8)      Reluctantly source a spoon.

The whole question of oats-to-water ratio is an interesting one (if you use a rather creative definition of the word "interesting"). At one end of the spectrum, adding no water means just eating raw porridge oats, which are not particularly interesting. At the other end, adding (for instance) the entire Atlantic Ocean to 40g of porridge oats means that I wouldn’t really taste the oats at all, but would also have to drink a fair bit more water than I usually drink. I’d also need to filter out all the sharks and boats and plastic bags, and would probably exceed my recommended daily allowance of salt.

So both ends of the spectrum are pretty bad, and part of the science of this week is trying to work out if there’s a sweet spot where two wrongs make a right (as the proverb famously suggests often happens) and it suddenly starts being an acceptable meal.

I think the best conclusion here is simply that porridge is not really my sort of meal. Although perhaps it would be better if I added literally anything else to it – which has actually led me to think of a good way of ending this challenge.

Currently, the challenge to eat plain rice, plain beans and plain porridge finishes on Friday. I am considering making Saturday into a transition today between the challenge and ordinary life, by still eating porridge for breakfast and rice and beans for lunch and dinner; but then I am free to add as many other ingredients as I like. So I can make the porridge with milk, honey, sugar, asbestos – any of the classic additions. Similarly, lunch and dinner can be any dish that involves rice and beans in some way. In that way, Saturday would make this into an actual food blog where I genuinely cook something. (And since I’m not a particularly good cook, this could be quite a disastrous process in and of itself).

So this seems like a good time to introduce a “stretch goal”. I am incredibly thankful for everybody who has donated towards the challenge so far – your generosity really will make a huge impact. Thanks to another donation overnight, you’ve now raised £270 in total, which is beyond what I was aiming for. But if I can be cheeky and prey on your generosity further, I’ve set a new target of £350. If we reach that by Friday evening, I’ll continue this blog for an extra day and write about my Saturday porridge/rice/beans experience as well. (Plus I’ll still be writing an extra 5 words a day for each pound donated). The link for donations is below if you’re able to help.

In the meantime, thank you again for reading and for your support. This afternoon I’ll be trying (and most likely failing) to make falafel from two ingredients. Watch this space.

 Note: As part of my Mean 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 £270, which means I’m aiming at 1,550 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.