Breakfast

Once upon a time, my favorite breakfast in the world was a can of warm Coke and a chilled Snickers bar. No, I’m not joking. For years (years) this was my go-to. From high school, all through college, and even into the first few months of my marriage, I broke my fast each day with what I rationalized was not much different than a cup of coffee and a danish … just different.

Then I discovered I was pregnant with Mary Hannah, and suddenly even I wasn’t fooled by my nutritional ruse. Not willing to undertake the level of breakfast preparation my Mamaw took on every morning as she tied on her apron (homemade biscuits, sausage gravy, fried eggs, and perculated coffee every day?!?), I reached way, way back in my life experiences, to the days when I was very small–early elementary school– and my mother still got up with me every morning to put me on the school bus. What did I eat then? My only memories involved boiled eggs and cold cereal, neither of which appealed to my 22 year-old taste buds. Finally, I hit on the fabulous memory of staying with my aunt and uncle a few days while still in high school. Not only did my aunt wake me by quietly sitting on the side of my bed and speaking softly (unknown in my house), she also had a small glass of orange juice in her hand for me. And, at the table … a toasted bagel.

Score!

So for years thereafter, if I ate anything at all for breakfast, it was a bagel, or maybe a muffin, or possibly a piece of toast. Of course, my kids always had breakfast. I have fond memories of sitting at the table early in the morning, after Christopher had gone to work, nursing Mathaus, munching a blueberry muffin, and watching toddler Mary Hannah devour a bowl of grits.

I’m not sure, exactly, when breakfast became a bigger deal. Baby number three, maybe? When Christopher’s job shifted a little, leaving his time to enjoy a morning meal with us? Whatever the case, at some point, my dozen muffins baked up every week or so suddenly became a daily chore. Sausage links showed up on the shopping list. And my day suddenly felt incomplete without an actual meal right off the bat.

Nowadays, breakfast is an undertaking. Like every family with more than a few members, recipes are routinely doubled, and often tripled. We no longer rely on carb-heavy breakfasts (generally take longer to make and aren’t as filling, either) except as the occasional celebratory treat topped off with a heavy dose of protein to balance things out. (And by “things,” I mean sugar-fueled behaviors.) Most of our breakfasts are scratch-made affairs; there aren’t too many egg, ham, and cheese casseroles on the convenience food market that I know of, and even if there were, well … we eat such a large volume that cost would be prohibitive.

Large volume has cut off our pancake and waffle habit for the most part, too; it is simply no fun to stand for an hour flipping cakes while everyone else eats two, stands in line, is served more, eats two, stands in line … and you snatch bites on the fly.

You get the picture.

When we want something similar, we’ve switched to baked versions that allow for the full family to sit down and enjoy the meal together. Syrups are regularly of the homemade variety, too. The cost of quality maple syrup that isn’t just a brew of HFCS flavored with fake maple is just stunning when the better part of a regular-sized bottle is consumed at each meal. Stocking the freezer with huge bags of organic berries from Costco means that a batch of fresh, still-warm strawberry syrup is only a little sugar and a splash of vanilla away every day.

We go through pounds of bacon, cheese, potatoes, bananas, apples, and sausage every week. Dozens and dozens of eggs. Many loaves of bread. (Christopher has a lovely recipe that is hypothetically for a sourdough, but is somehow a lovely, mellow white for toasting and smearing with jam.) At least one canister of oats. And this is just for one of the three meals that gets served up here each day.

It makes me chuckle, now, when I see my 17 year-old standing at the counter, instructing her 6 year-old brother on proper egg-cracking technique. I marvel at the way things in her life are so different from my own at her age. To my knowledge, Mary Hannah has never started her day with a Coke and a Snickers … and I’m pretty sure the idea has never crossed her mind. Just as the thought of tucking a soda and candy bar in her backpack and heading out the door without saying goodbye to anyone is utterly foreign to her, so to will the concept of not making breakfast for her husband and family seem one day when she is the mother of the house. Unlike me, wondering what to make, she’ll be battling her own little breakfast crisis…

How do you scramble less than two dozen eggs at a time?