Quinoa Porridge

This was today's breakfast situation. It was elegant, delicious and also as rare as a solar eclipse.

The reason I was laying a scarf (whose day job is covering a hideous green chair) on my table and actually arranging banana coins rather than just throwing them on as I usually do has a story behind it. This term Nat and I decided to do a kitchen challenge: Every week, we suggest a food theme, which we take and make our own by adding little quirks. This week I suggested we try reverse psychology on our food. That is, we would make usually savoury food sweet, and usually sweet food savoury. The past couple of weeks have been: Asian, and soup, and each time Nat would take absolutely gorgeous pictures of her food, while I would just make mine and then promptly inhale it. So to honour the challenge I decided to dress this week's bowl up a little.

There's also a reason why what is laying on the scarf is a bowl of quinoa porridge rather than the spinach pancakes with a chickpea and apple filling I initially planned to make. The reason is quite simply, that the spinach pancakes didn't happen.

On Tuesday night I decided to try the pancake recipe from Green Kitchen Stories, envisioning soft music playing as I gently flipped a speckled green pancake and stuffed it with just the right amount of a lemony-chickpea and apple filling. However, being in the tiny student kitchens of pearl house rather and lacking quite a few ingredients, things were rather different, and I found myself trying to scrape green mushy mess into a conceivably solid lump in order to salvage any hope of actually eating what could now only be called a green monster rather than a green pancake.

The whole thing tasted delicious, and the apple and chickpea filling balanced the earthy tones of the green lumps perfectly, however they were not presentable at all, no matter what scarf they were framed by. When I told Alex the next day about my kitchen mishaps, she euphemistically tried to make me feel a little better: 'Maybe they were more dropped scones than pancakes?'

Well, yes, if you mean dropped-on-the-floor.

So, to redeem my failed pancakes is why I found myself this morning making quinoa into porridge. Cinnamon-spiced, maple-drizzled, banana-crowned porridge.

Sometimes I feel like quinoa porridge on a silk scarf, other times I look like spinach lumps in a plastic swedish-glace container. That's life.

On Mondays and Tuesdays I'm generally spinach-lumpy. I'm rushing to finish my essay, my lunch is often something sad like a roasted sweet potato and a whole bowl of plain lettuce, or something bizarre like lots of bananas and almond butter and half a cucumber and maybe some shredded wheat. Whatsapps go unanswered, numerous blog posts are born out of mid-term boredom and then sit in the draft folder for weeks. I suppose what I'm trying to convey is that I am just as messy, human, and strange as most nineteen going on twenty year old people.

But I also have my quinoa porridge days, the days where I wake up at 7am in the morning to do Yoga before breakfast and then find the time before lectures to cycle down to Kings parade and draw (okay this happened once, and it got too cold to stay there for a long time so I finished one spire of the chapel, and a couple of cartoons of the various stages of Me writing an essay before cycling off to find warmth) or actually manage to do a proper cat eye in my stage make up, or figure out how to cut a mango.

What has your day been like?