The main benefit of the porridge book has not been the recipes in it, but how it’s made me rethink porridge.

In my mind, porridge has always been a simple meal. It consists of the porridge itself and a topping. The porridge itself is utter simplicity: grains + liquid + salt. The topping can be jam, honey, fruit, or possibly even a combination such as apple sauce + cinnamon. The most adventurous that I’ve been in the past is putting (some of) the topping in the porridge: cooking the porridge with a diced apple, instead of adding apple sauce on top, and then maybe adding nuts as well. Two toppings? Where will this craziness end?

Somehow it’s never really occurred to me that I could add more. It’s like I didn’t give myself permission to make porridge a complex, luxurious thing… because it’s not supposed to be?

You can put cinnamon AND cardamom in the porridge. You can cook the fruit – fry the banana, turn the pears into a compote, make a sauce from the cherries. You can do that AND add a sauce AND nuts as well. All at the same time

This looks ugly as all get out – beige with brown and more brown and then this really horrible greenish-brown – but it was decadently good. Cardamom-flavoured four-grain porridge, a home-made pear compote, an artisanal peppermint-flavoured honey, and chopped walnuts.

Also: one of the three spoons I bought in Japan was just perfect.