Adapted

Porridge with apricots and honey

A conversion of an established dish. The underlying technique is known-good; the substitutions below are the novel part, and they are documented.

Serves2
Burners1
Pans1
Water0.6 L
Active6 min
Total12 min
FridgeNot needed
Modestrip, pantry

Ingredients

  • Rolled oats 100 g
  • Skimmed milk powder 30 g
  • Apricots (dried) 60 g
  • Honey 20 g
  • Salt (fine) 2 g

Breakfast that costs pennies, weighs almost nothing and needs six minutes of a burner.

Two things separate good porridge from wallpaper paste, and neither costs anything.

Salt. A proper pinch, in at the start. Porridge without salt tastes of nothing and people reach for more sugar to fix a problem that is not sweetness.

Chop the apricots and add them early. Dried fruit added at the end sits on top as a garnish. Added with the oats, it rehydrates in the milk, softens, and gives its sweetness up into the whole pan — so you need less honey.

  1. Chop the apricots roughly.
  2. Whisk the milk powder into 500 ml of cold water in the pan. Cold first, always — powder tipped into hot liquid lumps and stays lumpy.
  3. Oats, apricots and salt in. Bring to a gentle simmer, stirring, and cook 5 to 6 minutes until it thickens.
  4. Honey stirred through off the heat, so it stays fragrant.

Make what you will eat. Reconstituted milk powder is ordinary milk from the moment you add the water, and cooked porridge without refrigeration does not keep — see cooling and keeping cooked food.

Serves 2.

What this was adapted from

Standard stovetop porridge

  • fresh milk → skimmed milk powder reconstituted in the pan

    Milk powder keeps for months unopened and weighs a fraction of the liquid it makes. Reconstituting it directly in the pan with the oats saves a step. Note that once reconstituted it is ordinary milk and keeps like ordinary milk, so make only what you will eat.