Orange Porridge

Porridge for second breakfast has become the norm for me. Even at weekends when my humans are at home, I trot up the road at porridge time anticipating a couple of spoonfuls in my dedicated bowl.

Porridge is gloop really but it's tasty. SHE puts peanut butter in porridge (that might be the main attraction). However I arrived this morning to discover she'd forgotten to soak her porridge oats last night so I watched very carefully what went into the pot - oats, milk powder, brown flour from a packet that had LINSEED FL… written on it, some peanut butter (YES - how about a little lick of that for me? just hold the porridge), and then weirdness of weirdness mashed pumpkin. Well that explains orange porridge.

Mine gets served with a small dollop of yoghurt. Hers gets such a collection of nuts, seeds and fruit, yoghurt and sprinkled with some spice that it takes ages to open and close jars and assemble it all. My porridge is half digested before she sits down to eat hers.

my 'not posing' pose

F here - I read somewhere (8-10 years ago) some academic type advocating that we should eat at least 30 different plant type foods a week to support gut biome diversity. It makes sense to me. I started attending to that in earnest when I moved to Greece in 2018 - a place where fulfilling such an objective is easy and relatively inexpensive. Remarkably since doing that I have all but eliminated my formerly crippling IBS episodes from my life. Life without fold-me-in-half gut spasms is wonderful and in case I ever need reminding of that I need only let my attention to diverse diet lapse a week or two (travelling for instance) and something in my inner workings starts a protest, threatening to become a riot if not appeased.

My breakfast is 15. I eat two meals a day and make sure my second meal has at least 10 items of plant food (everything counts - including ginger, tamarind, garlic, chillies, herbs and spices, lentils, beans.... I don't count starch foods like spuds, wheat, polenta, quinoa and so on but they qualify)

Scully is diversifying her palate and now readily consumes cooked carrots, pumpkin, parsnips, sweet potato, and lentil soup. (To be fair she prefers beef bones, cheese and the yoghurt pot.)

5kg bucket of peanut butter