When you are leaving the orphanage with your toddler, one of the last things you will likely hear from the staff is a friendly reminder not to change his or her diet too fast. But maybe you were at the orphanage during feeding time and saw the grayish-brown porridge they served the children. Maybe you came away thinking, I can't change this diet fast enough.

But there are two good reasons for heeding that dietary reminder. The first is something you've probably experienced in your travels: If your stomach isn't used to a particular kind of food, it rebels. And the last thing you want on a long plane, train or car ride is a cranky toddler with diarrhea.

The second reason is that that porridge, which the Russians call kasha, is actually pretty good nutrition: It's all whole grain. The kind of food that nutritionists want Americans to eat more of. Northwestern University has a great primer about whole grains here.

The only association most Americans have with kasha is kasha varnishkes, the buckwheat and bowtie pasta dish that is a staple at Jewish delis. But kasha to Russians encompasses a wide range of whole grains, served in savory and sweet variations, at breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert. And it makes for some wonderful food memories, as I found at Yulinka Cooks, the only food blog I have found so far that's devoted to Russian cooking. Here's her post on kasha.

To educate myself about kasha, I turned to my mainstay Russian cookbook, Please To The Table. Author Anya von Bremzen says that, 600 years ago, the word kasha meant feast in the Russian language. And the word is central to a whole bunch of Russian idioms about life. Where we in English say, You can't have too much of a good thing, Russians say, You can't spoil kasha with butter. Faced with an intractable opponent, they might comment, You can't make kasha with him, i.e. you're not going to get anywhere.

Please To The Table has recipes for several different kasha, from a buckwheat and mushroom side dish to a wheat berry cereal served only at religious festivals, a millet and pumpkin breakfast and a cornmeal mush that's pretty much identical to Italian polenta (which my younger son can't eat enough of). There are also several recipes on RusCuisine, though some of the instructions are a tad sketchy for novice cooks.

Of course once you go searching the Internet for things, you eventually fall down a rabbit hole, and so it is with kasha. I recently found what may be the ultimate kasha reference site, and it's called, you guessed it, AboutKasha.com.