Cold porridge is really nice. I want to have something to bring to work for breakfast, and this works excellently. Some people call it "overnight oats", but I don't, since I can't have oats.
Making it takes minimal effort the evening before, one part flakes, one part milk and one part yoghurt, mixed together, topped with whatever you prefer. I like to add wheat bran and blueberries. It'll work itself out overnight in the fridge and I can just grab it in the morning as I leave.
Deciding on what grains I'd like to use took a bit of thinking when I first tried this out a few weeks ago. In the supermarket, the grain shelves are overflowing with oats, much to my dismay.
There is however a smaller, but actually pretty decent variety of other options. There are the gluten free options - buckwheat, millet, maize, rice, what have you. But there are also the gluten grains, wheat, rye and barley. There were porridge flakes available of all of these options, but I gravitated toward barley in the end, because it has a pleasant flavour. Buckwheat and millet don't taste too nice in my opinion, and rice and maize don't taste like much of anything at all. So the classic grains were the way to go for me.
Besides oats, barley is a pretty normal option for porridge in my country. Rye is also used, but it's much, much, *much* more commonly used in bread, to the point that rye bread is the most consumed type of bread here. Rye has a bit of a strong flavour making it kind of tricky to add flavour to in porridge, but I could try it someday.
It turned out to be a good choice to pick barley - the barley flakes I've ended up buying are from a family business mill, organic, and it turned out they're considerably cheaper than the non-organic barley flakes in the stores! It was a surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.
I first used unflavoured yoghurt to make the porridge, but later found a brand of yoghurt that make flavoured options without added sugar. The fruits they use bring their own sugar and it's just enough to dampen the sour flavour of the yoghurt. Raspberry yoghurt pairs excellently with the blueberries I add. This way I get a little sweetness into my food but still keeping the sugar level pretty low. The other flavours of pear, mango and vanilla I haven't tried yet, but I think the vanilla one might be perfect once strawberry season kicks in soon. The others might be nice too, but I'd really like an apple flavour one to be able to combo it with cinnamon. I could always buy unflavoured and add apple jam, but that'd bring extra sugar.
A month into my porridge habit, I think it's here to stay! It's quick to make, very cheap, very tasty, and the ingredients last me quite long. Making sandwiches is a bit messy for me (I always manage to spread butter on my fingers which annoys me), and my previous go-to breakfast of yoghurt required me to buy more packages of it constantly. Now one package lasts me almost an entire week instead of just two days.