Porridge

Bland comfort, pools of cream

When I was small, my dad would make us porridge with milk and a teaspoon of jam in the middle, a glistening red jewel atop a bowl of bland comfort. I would eat mine carefully, eking out the sweetness, just a tiny dab in each mouthful.

My mum doesn’t like porridge for breakfast. She says it sends her straight back to sleep, is perhaps too soothing. For me, porridge is a bit of a fallback, a good option when there’s nothing better on offer because I always have oats and a pinch of salt. I like my porridge quite wet and naturally creamy, having been stirred constantly. In an ideal world, I would eat my creamy porridge served simply, with brown sugar and cream, perhaps some sliced strawberries, although they aren’t seasonal when I most want porridge. But in the world of quarter past six on a Wednesday morning, I am unlikely to lovingly stir my porridge for ten minutes, and I favour nutrition and satiety over simple perfection. So I mash a banana or grate an apple into the oats as they cook, leaving the pot to go wash my face and apply sunscreen. I add seeds, yoghurt, peanut butter, honey, cherries defrosted unceremoniously in the microwave. I draw the line at protein powder.

It is hard to cook the correct amount of porridge. Tim and I have settled on a scant cup of oats between us, yet some days this seems to make an obscene amount. On such days I will come home from work to find my bowl with cold, uneaten porridge in the bottom, and I will think of Sebastian describing King Alonso in The Tempest, saying, “He receives comfort like cold porridge.” To receive that which should be the utmost comfort, but in ruined form! It would be better to receive no porridge at all. But Sebastian’s description suggests a refusal to receive comfort, as though comfort itself were abhorrent to the King. Meanwhile, in these cold times, I seek nothing but comfort, and I will continue to receive each warm, moreish bowl of porridge with the gratitude it deserves.

What I’m eating…

With solstice passed we are now settling into colder days and nights here in Tāmaki, which for me means bakes, roasts and slow cooks. I have made Ixta Belfrage’s Butternut & Sage Lasagne Gratin (from the excellent book, Mezcla) twice in recent weeks — the recipe ingeniously foregoes béchamel, deriving it’s creaminess from a mixture of parmesan and fresh cream instead. Raw sliced butternut and tomato are layered with this creamy mixture and dried lasagne before being doused in stock and tightly sealed with foil so that everything steams, cooks and absorbs together before being finished with more cream and crispy sage leaves.

I also made Medovik — Russian honey cake — from Petra Galler’s Butter, Butter for Tim’s birthday earlier this month. It was, as she promised, not as hard as it looks, and well worth the effort. I plan to employ burnt honey icing on other baked goods in future. The recipe has been published here.

What I’ve written…

The large gap between my first Still Life despatch and this was due to a couple of meaty writing projects in their final throes, both now out in the world. One was an essay to accompany the latest exhibition at Artspace Aotearoa, Scores for Transformation. I was given an incredibly free reign to write around the ideas in the exhibition (bodies, the resistance, collapse and reform of) and ended up with something very personal and somehow freeing. If you’re interested, you can read Notes from a body here.

The other piece was an even longer time in the works and is about Tim’s artwork, Youth Portrait (2022), which he first conceived of back in 2019 when he was artist in residence at the McCahon House. My essay — All this could be ours: On Tim Wagg’s Youth Portrait — considers his video work within the lineage of two different genres, portraiture and landscape, and in the context of colonial New Zealand. Given he is one of my favourite artists, and having never really been able to write about his work before (conflict of interest when it comes to reviewing etcetera!), this essay ended up being a lot longer than intended, and yet I could have kept going and going.

What I’m reading…

While writing Notes from a body, I read Health Communism by Beatrice Adler Bolton and Artie Vierkant and Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick. Both are excellent aides for thinking about health, illness and disability, the former being an academic text while the latter is deeply personal.

Since finishing, I’ve been slowly returning to a more relaxing reading routine, picking up and reading/cooking my way through Rachel Roddy’s Two Kitchens and getting stuck into Tender Morsels (not a cookbook!) by Margo Lanagan, which I am only a quarter into and would already recommend.