Monks cannot work for money. They are doing the journey-work for the whole of society – discovering they way of the buddha  - for which grateful citizens feed them the ingredients for a daily porridge cook up which will sustain them on this journey.

Monks open their bowls , and what goes in (usually rice and different curries) forms a porridge like  gruel.

This photo essay – a chance encounter with two  groups in the Sule Pagoda/ china town beat records  the ingredient gathering for Monk Porridge.Click to view slideshow.

Stop in for a sausage roll and a cappuccino or grab some milk for some porridge alfresco

Or head up to Hawkin's Hill and eat muesli

Now its not like you couldn’t bring your sauasage roll up to any of the sceneic viewpoints around this quaint national parks managed semi ghost town, but people tend not to get much further than the car park, sacrificing the feast for the eyes which tend to accompany porridge picnics. Sitting on a hand hewn red gum slab bench that seemed to have been constructed precisely for our porridge picnic, Susan and I savoured the bush and the hills, which have regenerated over the last hundred years from the moonscape that gold hungrry minders turned this area into hoping to strike it rich.

porridge picnic on red gum slab.

Most of them didnt’t get rich , though the hoteliers, and the chinese market gardeners often did. The swag men and women who roamed the countryside also knew that they were surrounded by gold … the gold of being in nature,  theirs for the taking and the enhanceing  of the flavours of damper (I am sure a few were porridge eaters as well) with each  mouthful of every meal  enjoyed on a ridge top, by a billabong, or under a Coolabah tree.

Artists and  modern day fosickers  seem to know that just being in nature is gold,  particularly when national parks who are now running the town provide both dog friendly camping and panning.

Panning for gold.

Praise be to National parks who allow dogs into campgrounds and fossicking fields

Oats
Quinoa (sprouted or cooked)
Lentils (sprouted or cooked)
Soy milk – organic Non GM only (will do a whole post on the importance of this)
Blackstrap mollasses
Blueberries or other fresh fruit.

Serve with a cup of thyme tea with a squeeze of lemon, then go and do some exercise to utilize your oxygen  enriched blood !

Iron is a mineral that helps your blood access life giving oxygen and supply it to your cells. If you want  energy and good cellular health,  you need it. If you don’t have it, you become anaemic. According to www.whfoods.com the most iron dense foods include Soy, lentils, sesame and pumpkin seeds. Beef, traditonally the iron food,  is lower on the list after these more porridge friendly seeds and legumes, but is claimed to be far  more absorbable, which is why vegetarians sometimes are deficient.  Add a little bit of fresh-fruit-sourced vitamin C – some fresh strawberries, a squeeze of lemon, sprouts –  and the absorption of iron from plant foods is increased threefold, the vitamin C counteracting the inhibiting effects of phytytes found in grains and legumes. Or sprout  grains like

source: http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=nutrient&dbid=70

Quinoa to  reduce the phytates.  Wikipedia reckons that oats too are iron rich even though they are ignored on WH Foods?   There are lots of variables that seem to effect iron utilization. Copper may be  required for Iron to be absorbed, other minerals like calcium can inhibit absorption and who knows what other interactions count. This is an argument for eating  a wide variety of whole foods to cover all your bases :

Also from source: http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=nutrient&dbid=70

I feel like such a predator harvesting the leaves off the lettuces you planted for me , says my sister Susan who only last week became a vegetarian.  All food has an energetic resonance according to my friend Wendy who has recently trained as a raw food chef in California. Carrots have been proven to  communicate with each other across a field, she told me and the energy surrounding their cultivation carries through to whoever consumes them.  Jain’s – the vegetarian wanderers of India who use a peacock feather to sweep insects away from the impending doom of their footseps would not eat a carrot; they do not eat vegetables in which the plant needs to be killed for their sustenance , according to William Dalrymple  in his interview with Jain Monk Prasanamati Mataji in the book Nine Lives.

Life is Life eating life; says Jospeh Campbell – and many rituals have grown up around hunters( and gatherers)  being forced to accept this fact everytime they kill a plant or animal.  Explorer Sir George Grey’s describes in his  1830 journal  (recorded  in Songlines  by Bruce Chatwin) the dance of  an Aborigine hunting a kangaroo:
“his graceful movements, cautious advance, the air of quietude and repose which pervade his frame when his prey his alarmed, all involuntarily call forth your imagination and compel you to murmur to yourself, ‘How beautiful! How very beautiful!’”

Wwoofing on an organic farm in Chiba japan, by  instruction, my friend Yoko and I would cut back the leaves of the weeds growing up around the heritage rice, careful not to disrupt the integrity of the soil crust with all its life forms, apologizing for the cut then thanking the weeds for providing green mulch to warm and shelter the emerging seedlings.

Awareness, consciousness, love and kindness arise from our relationships with food.

Today I am soaking oat groats hoping to sprout my own porridge on my Hong Kong balcony which I will respect in the spirit of the Jain ( whisking ants clear with my peacock feather), fertilize with the love of a Japanese organic farmer, and harvest with the poise, grace  and beauty of Sir George Grey’s Aborigine – saying a prayer of gratitude as I eat the porridge.

My primary motivation is to support my sister for whom this is important on an animal welfare level. My nephew has also become vegetarian,  his motivations spiritual – moving beyond the painful paradox of one minute disneyfying animals and then the next minute eating them. I am inspired by his ability to zoom in on this unconciousness raising aspect of our society. My meat substitute is now self righteousness; being able to scream “meat is murder”  is intoxifying!

A third motivation is health. The China Study  which I have just read, basically puts it that the more vegetables you eat – the better health you will have.

In the three days that i have now been a vegetarian, I have honed in that you need to eat far more food, far more regularly -no problem there.

Variety and having food at hand is important; fruit, nuts , and vegetables washed and scattered about in bowls around the house, pulses soaking, vege snack delights like dolmades and samosas prepared and ready to be eaten – food accessible in all stages of preparation, dips, pickles, chutneys, ground nuts, seeds – then this diet becomes a lot of fun,  with lots of exploration and discoveries.

And porridge of course plays its part. Soak the cereal the night before (as a vegetarian there should always be some lentil, whole grain or bean, or nut soaking to remove any antinutreints in their protective coatings in a pot in your kitchen). Porridge  keeps cold  9 days according to the Peas porridge ryhme  and  was traditonally  left to solididy in  wooden draws by Scottish hearths, sliced into oat cakes to be snacked on during the day. Adapt this concept  as vegan apple and oatmeal cake or  or with chocolate, orange zest, cinnamon – any number of things. Let your left over porridge be your inspiration as it was for this blogger!

Let  your imagination soar, your eating become kind, your doubts become certainty,  and your porridge become cake.