"porridge" news and stories

• It's Restaurant Week in the Windy City: Fancy meals at bargain prices.
• What's the next cupcake? (Some say it's...the cupcake.)
• Most Chicagoans have heard of top chef Grant Achatz -- but few really know him.
• Time for porridge! (Can you contain your excitement?)

A hot breakfast was the standard prison breakfast for many, many years for the same reasons that oatmeal is a popular breakfast food on the outside: it's healthy, filling and inexpensive. But porridge is off the menus in British prisons, replaced with a "breakfast pack" that costs only 27p per prisoner (about 46¢ US). The reason for the change, according to audit investigators, was "because cooked breakfasts are no longer part of contemporary eating habits in the wider community". Since the prison officials are so on top of food trends, they found it necessary to remove the offending breakfast cereal from their menus.

It is highly that the change was made to save money. While the breakfast pack - which includes 1 cup of breakfast cereal, two slices of bread, jam or marmalade, margarine, tea bags, instant coffee and a small milk cartoon - might cost slightly more per serving than oatmeal, it is given to the prisoners the night before and prepared and eaten by them in the morning. This eliminates the need to have the kitchen staff on hand for one meal every day.

Source

"Jook" is a general Korean term for "porridge," similar to Chinese congee. Back in November, Stephania shared her family's recipe for turkey jook as a way to use up leftover turkey. Today, we're having jaht jook, a Korean pine nut and rice porridge.

Koreans eat this for breakfast, but usually, jaht jook used to be saved for special occasions because pine nuts are expensive and not always available. The expensive part is still true, but not the availability part - you can even get pine nuts at Costco year round.

There are a few recipes on the web from various sources like ethnicgrocer (that calls it "chatchuk" which seems very inaccurate because it's not "chat, chuck," ), recipesource, and even reprints of Dok Suni's recipe, but this is the way my Mom told me how to make it.

I'm one of those Martha Stewart types who dives into holiday dinner planning feet-first. When I first started making Swedish Christmas dinner two years ago, I researched on the true holiday traditions so I could recreate the experience as closely as possible.

The first thing I discovered was that Swedes eat a very simple and humble dinner on Christmas Eve, the night of the true celebration - the presents are all opened on Christmas Eve, and that's when Father Christmas or the more authentic Jule nissen, or Christmas gnome (think an elf complete with little green overalls, but a bit bigger), comes with the gifts. On the menu: porridge, or rice pudding, and lutfisk. That's usually the extent of it - the big smorgasbörd (literally) comes after church on Christmas Day.