Note that Josie is four in this story. She is now eight.

My current technique: Start the grain soaking with a sprinkling of salt the morning before. Just before bed, drain it, refill it, and set the crock pot to cook overnight. I have a Rival Crock-ette, it's teeny and exactly the right size for porridge. While they don't make that particular one any more, this one looks like a good substitute, and it's cheap, too.

Soaking grains neutralizes their natural anti-nutrients, making their nutrition more available and curing a lot of digestive difficulties you can have with grains. Josie and I have no trouble with gluten-containing grains if they're treated this way, though we still avoid modern wheat. TMI department: Josie and I rarely have gas and diarrhea like we used to since we started eating porridge prepared this way, and started avoiding wheat as much as possible.

I use a LOT more water now, easily one-to-four grain-to-water, and if we don't eat most of the porridge I just add a little more water and keep it going. It's often better the next day; the Chinese believe that the longer you cook porridge the better it is for you.

I also have a pepper grinder that I keep filled with whole pickling spices, and I grind that into the cooking water when I turn the crockpot on. It contains many good digestive herbs (black pepper, cinnamon and ginger, for example) and makes the porridge fragrant, spicy and a little sweet.(Pickling spice is one of my great culinary cheats, the other being herbes de provence.)

Our favorite grain right now is brown rice. We all tolerate it well, and it doesn't need soaked as long so if I forget to put grain on to soak in the morning I can throw that on quite late in the day. I call this "white people congee." Congee is a traditional Chinese porridge that's usually made of white rice and is usually served savory, whereas I make ours with brown rice and serve it with butter, a sweetener like honey, sorghum or maple syrup, and possibly milk and dried fruit. Tomorrow I'm putting dried apples in mine.

We also like spelt berries and oat groats, especially cooked 24 hours, and sometimes I'll make a mixture of grains.

Lynn Siprelle, Editor