Breakfast

I generally look forward to every meal I get to eat at home, because it's another chance to cook something. (I try to force myself to wait to cook something until I (or somebody else) wants to eat it.) The meal that is the general exception is breakfast. I've never really mastered breakfast.

Part of the problem is that breakfast comes in such a varied scale-- in terms of preparation time, size, and protein/etc. content. There are the minimalist French breakfasts of bread, butter, and jam, or more substantial spreads (peanut butter! cheese!). There are eggs of all sorts. Cereals (sweet and savory). And these breakfasts can have very different effects at staving off hunger for the day. Some leave me hungry by 11 a.m., others basically take me past lunch. To cook yourself the perfect breakfast, you have to know in advance how hungry you're going to want to be later, and when. On some days (like in the midst of my clerking routine) that's fine. But on Saturday mornings, who knows what the day will bring?

Another part of the problem is that I prefer savory breakfasts to sweet ones, and I haven't yet found the perfect savory-yet-whole-grain nutritious breakfast cereal for default days when I don't know what else to have. Seedy bread with peanut butter and salt, or with melted cheese and spices, make for a pretty good and satisfying start, but both are relatively high and fat. Eggs have a similar problem, and I can't eat eggs every day. I went through a phase of eating grits with salsa every day, which was pretty good, until I learned that the grits available in my grocery store were sufficiently processed that they didn't count as a whole grain anyway.