Mornings on the seedy side

I'll try to paint a picture for you, something soul warming, a still life of a country breakfast. A misty morning, a woodfired stove with coffee percolating its bitter dark contents, pans of sizzling house-smoked and salted bacon and runny farm eggs, bowls of creamy, steaming porridge. Sturdy wooden tables and bone-handled cutlery. A jug of clotted cream, a fresh loaf of coarse country bread with rich yellow, valve-clogging butter and jars of thick-cut marmalade, the last of the late-summer wild blackberry jam and that familiar yellow and black labelled Vegemite. A dog curled under the table, waiting for the crispy rind to be passed his way. Outside, a magpie in the sunrise, baby lambs cry abandonment. A fire in the hearth.

Can you see it? I'm not sure whether this is a memory from childhood, but more likely it's a Crawford mini-series involving Lorraine Bayly and a boat (as they all did).

I have to admit, if I haven't before, that I love this idea. But try as I might, I really don't wake up hungry. Instead, trying to jolt the body into some semblance of clarity, I wake to a hard man's breakfast: a cup of strong coffee, ristretto double shot, thinking a cigarette would be perfect, but then remembering that I haven't smoked since I was 15 (sorry mum) and under the stage at Ginninderra High School, when smokes cost something like 20¢ a packet. I hated them but - at this time and place - the only way of being remotely left alone was to be part of the smoking crowd.

But I'm a firm believer in the benefits of breakfast, and I celebrate each day by making it an option for the family while I darkly come to life over coffee.

What I've never really got is porridge. It just looks so dull and stodgy - like stuff they would feed you if you were working in a mine during the Depression. To this day, I haven't even tried porridge, so convinced have I been that it is Third World at best. But, over the past year, I keep seeing people really get into porridge action and the whole ceremony: soaking the grain and preparing condiments such as thick cream, honey, fruits, nuts, even spices. So this and my new Faviken cookbook have finally got me to the point of experimenting with oats.

Chef Magnus Nilsson's book on his style of Nordic cooking focuses on a huge repertoire of foraged and seasonal foods, using many preserving techniques. Much of it is totally beyond anyone to make. Seriously, it very hard to find a dish where you'd say, ''OK, I think I can find some moss and elkhorn, chuck in some branches of birch and ferment it in a frogpond fed by glacial waters.'' But his recipe for ''Johnny's porridge'' made me think I could amass the eight grains and seeds he suggests without having to travel to an Arctic region covered in permafrost and battle seals and polar bears for sustenance.

This is very easy, and if you are a fan of oaten glue for breakfast, I can recommend this version. You just need to find a good health-food store that deals in, well, birdseed, I guess. And items such as stewed rhubarb, poached quinces, marinated prunes, sauted apples and cinnamon are all apparent gold with good porridge. Which shows that porridge does need something else, even though the purists would only have a pinch of salt and clotted cream as seasoning.

I have to admit this is a nice, complex, textural dish, not that I'll turn to it instead of caffeine. I'm just saying that if you are into breakfast and porridge, this is worthwhile getting into. Nilsson's advice is to keep the grains and seeds in airtight containers, and only mix together what you will use in a reasonable period, and soak the porridge overnight in water.

So here's an adaptation of what he suggests, with ingredients I found without having to spend too much time searching, and a few condiments that work well.

>>Bryan Martin is winemaker at Ravensworth and Clonakilla, bryanmartin.com.au