Breakfast

I know that I should eat breakfast every morning.  It’s really not much of a problem for me, because I tend to wake up ravenous most days.  Except, well, that it is something of a problem in that I can only eat a very small amount when I first wake up, and by the time I’m ready for a proper sort of breakfast, I’m usually on my way to work.

We hear over and over that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and hence our vague feelings of guilt if we do skip it.  We are told that school children perform better, having eaten breakfast, but the studies are a bit varied in their results.  I don't really need science to motivate me, though.  I already want to eat breakfast.  On weekends, it really is the most important meal of my day, usually.  We go out for breakfast or brunch as often as the budget will bear, and when we stay in we make stratas, frittatas, omelettes, scrambled egg quesadillas, or even just a basic bacon-and-eggs-with-toast-and-fried-potatoes.  Weekend breakfast is not the problem - I have the time and resources, plus a number of nearby restaurants that do excellent morning fare.  It's the weekday breakfast that provides the challenge.

The bottom line is that I like breakfast.  I like the foods involved in breakfast – the eggs, the toast, the various cured meats.  I even like cereal.  I don’t want cereal every day, however, despite the fact that I could and did go for uninterrupted months having puffed wheat for breakfast every day as a child, before moving on to more uninterrupted months of Shreddies, and then homemade granola.  I was a serial cereal eater.  Maybe that’s what I don’t want cereal every day anymore. 

What it often boils down to is balancing timing against boredom.  Cereal is quick and has a relatively low ability threshold that even pre-coffee-stumbling-in-the-kitchen can manage with a minimal risk of wrecking something.  Toast, the other frequent flyer in my morning routine, is also quick and painless, and unarguably more versatile as the opportunity for a variety of toppings is substantially higher.  Toast, toast, cereal, toast, cereal.  That was my work week, last week.  Once in a while, when I’m feeling particularly alert in the morning, and don’t fall into a steam-trance in the shower, I’ll scramble up an egg to put on my toast.

Like most people, especially but not restricted to those who went on to college or some other post-secondary institution, I’ve eaten some crazy-assed things for breakfast.  Cold pizza is not just a cliché, it’s a simple fact for a lot of students, starving or otherwise.  The only difference was that mine was homemade – all I could manage on a school budget.  Other strange things I’ve had for breakfast include, variously, chunks of beef fished out of leftover stew in the fridge, apple crisp, chocolate cake, and toast with hummus.   I’m also told that it’s fairly peculiar to put peanut butter on pancakes, but I don’t care!  I also put yogurt on pancakes – not the plain stuff, though, that would be weird.  Except, maybe, compared to kippers.  The point is, I'm not really all that picky an eater.

The late nineties saw the emergence of the smoothie, a bandwagon that I've never been keen to join.  Basically a cross between a milkshake and juicing (healthy, without the hippy connotations), made easier by the prevalence of food processors, smoothies were suddenly being touted by almost everyone as the ideal breakfast for the busy-person-on-the-go.   Apparently these busy people still had time to clean the blender, yes?  These days, you can even get smoothies at such fashionable eateries as Feenie’s, and at a reasonable price.  I don’t order them when I'm out, because they are too filling to be a supplement to a cooked breakfast, but not substantial enough to carry the day on their own.  Perhaps they are more suitable for someone who has difficulty facing solid food in the early part of the day.  If you can’t chew it, it doesn’t feel like breakfast food to me; which also eliminates yogurt from the equation.   

I keep telling myself that I’m going to make a batch of pancakes and freeze them, in a sort of homemade Eggo™ approach.  Pop one into the toaster, and voilà!  Instant breakfast.  Not that dissimilar from toast, really, especially if you like peanut butter, and just as easy on a sleepy morning.  I never quite manage it, though.  I think I’ve done it twice in the past five years, and that was more out of necessity when the batch of pancakes I was making for breakfast turned out larger than expected.  I tend to reach for savory before sweet food (which may go some distance to explain the peanut butter on pancakes thing), so even if I have baked a delicious and healthy banana bread the night before, I’m more likely to want to take that as part of my lunch than eat it for breakfast.  If I’ve delayed eating for too long in the morning, though, I’ll eat anything I can get my mitts on – sweet, savory, or somewhere in the cardboard-y middle. 

I suppose I just need to remind myself that there are plenty of things to eat for breakfast.  That I'm lucky that the quest for variety is the greatest of my breakfast tribulations. Breakfast-advocating web sites abound, with helpful suggestions of things that I either already eat, are too time consuming for weekdays, or I have already rejected for the above reasons.  Sometimes I see something that would work for me, but I forget about it by the time it comes to do the shopping or I’m running on auto-pilot and the ingredients quietly go stale or get eaten in other contexts.  I could tape a list to the inside of a cupboard, or prop it up on the cookie tin, I suppose, where it will get a lot of viewing.  That way, when I’m staggering through the kitchen at 6:30am, virtually a helpless prisoner of habit, I’ll have some options readily at hand.  It would keep me from stopping at the Tim Horton’s on the way to work, at any rate.

 February 2005