Having already entertained the idea of savoury yoghurt (verdict - not really worth it), inspired by this Epicurious recipe I decided to stray into the world of savoury porridge. Or "savory oatmeal" as the recipe would have it.

Now, I didn't think before I started that this was necessarily a bad idea. Apart from a cheeky bowl of coco pops, I don't like sweet things for breakfast and want to up my repertoire of quick, non-sweet breakfast things. Particularly those that don't involve bread as while woman probably could live on bacon sandwiches alone, she probably shouldn't. 

I tweaked the recipe slightly adding a cup of oats (too much for one), with salt (it definitely needs a good salting), pepper, dried thyme and water into a pan and cooked through. I fried the egg and topped the porridge with grated parmesan instead of gruyere, also switching the olive oil for truffle oil.

Boy, it was good. Have everyday for the next week kind of good. You might scoff that you could top a phone directory with parmesan and truffle oil and it would taste good. Probably true. But this only needed a dribble and a Scottish scatter of both to make it delicious with the thyme and oats themselves doing a lot of the work. Ditch the fiddly, sticky little pots of honey (I'm referring to you here Pret) and go savoury. Think of it as like grits, if we had grits in the UK. But stick to putting the toppings actually on the top rather than stirred through - a stray mushroom embedded in a spoon of porridge might trigger the gag reflex. A resounding success.