Hodge podge oat porridge

This dish is really not meant for anyone's eyes. In fact, it should not even deserve a square inch in this food blog. After all, a hodge podge of leftovers in an oat porridge is not a cause for attention.

But how can a bit of everything taste so good , at least to me? There in the fridge are : half a handful of nearly petrified ikan bilis and dough fritters from yesteryear's porridge meal, some leek greens that is a no-no in our home ( even the whites of the leek is greeted with disdain in an experimental leek-prawn kebab that night ).

To say it’s a dish of innovation is really stretching the truth too far. Anyway, by a stroke of genius, I plonked the above into a boiling pot of hot water and added 30g of oats. In a split second, my lunch is ready!

After the first mouthful, I realized I have to take a picture of this strange lunch. The savory fishy critters coupled with the crunch of green leeks and scalded instant oats lit a light bulb in my head - WooW ! Limp dough fritters in oat porridge is on the other hand, an acquired taste!

So here it is, this strange lunch meal. The usual photographer was at work, so I grabbed the bigger of the DSLRs in the dry box but still couldn't capture the "Ding" in my head. Even so, it is one of my most interesting OEM lunch.

Crazy bantering : cookbooks

I reckon many wannabee cooks are like me whenever they see a recipe from a cookbook - dive into the actual hands-on without reading the pages before and after.

So it was to great chagrin that I discovered after several episodes of near failure that essential information is stated in the pesky page called preface.

For once, I realized that when the author mentions butter, it is "room temperature" unless otherwise stated. The trouble is that what's room temperature in the north is freezing at the tropics. Or a finger of butter ( but is it the thumb or little finger ? )

Likewise it's a certain wattage for the oven so good luck if your oven is anything but that. Worse still, who knows what the oven's wattage is when the heat box has been lying around for ages?

Yet, cooking is a precise art, a food science. While estimation is fine in home cooking, approximation in the commercial world is a no-no.

So what's for dinner mum? Help me locate my cauldron, stirring stick and the wonky charcoal stove. That's it : a 15 kg cast iron cauldron, 2 meters walnut stick and 400 watts charcoal stove.