Breakfast Fuck Yeah!
Y’all, it’s time to talk about breakfast.
You see, while we were all holed up last week during Hurricane Irene, my friends and I embarked on a long chain e-mail about how if the end of the world were coming (Yes, we were being melodramatic. And we were bored. Bear with me.) we all really wished we’d had the foresight to make a huge breakfast before the storm descended. Because we all LOVE breakfast. Then, when it appeared the worst had passed us by, some of us got together and made a huge breakfast.
Because I have to get up earlier than I like and head to work, breakfast most days is a bowl of cereal and juice. But on weekends, I pull out all the stops. I have a boyfriend who I was convinced stayed over on Fridays not for the sex, but because I made omelettes and cheese grits on weekends. I also make rockin’ French toast, as taught to me by BigStepdaddy, who—I’m happy for you and Imma let you finish—makes the best French toast of all time. Pancakes? Yeah, I make those bitches from scratch. And I am probably the only Jew in Brooklyn who has a genuine bacon press in her kitchen. I am also rather fond of the iconic full English breakfast, probably because when I was a student in England, it was the only decent meal the university cafeteria turned out, and I love spicy Mexican breakfasts with chilaquiles, frijoles and green chile sauce.
I realize not everyone is a breakfast lover. Late risers could care less and usually go directly to lunch. One of my college roommates had a cold can of Coke for breakfast every morning and considered it the perfect way to start the day. But there’s something about a big-ass breakfast that makes it the ideal meal. You can overindulge and it won’t keep you awake at night with indigestion like a huge dinner will. There’s evidence that people who eat breakfast regularly, especially children, have higher energy levels during the day and are generally healthier than those who skip it. And breakfast food is just so damn good.
What’s your favorite breakfast? Or are you happy with just coffee and a cigarette? Do you have recipes to share? Please share! (And enjoy my favorite breakfast recipe after the jump).
Nom Nom Cheese Grits
1 cup of grits (Do not use the instant kind—they taste like wallpaper paste. Get the regular Quaker brand, or a fancier organic brand like Bob’s Red Mill. If you are a serious OG Southerner, you might have the stone-ground kind, like Anson Mills Antebellum or Carolina Plantation, which are coarser and take longer to cook but are the tastiest of all.)
2 cups of water
1 cup of milk (Skim is fine, whole milk is better. If you were to use cream or half-and-half, the end result will be very rich but it will taste amazing. Don’t even think of using soy milk or rice milk. If you’re a vegan or can’t have dairy, just use water).
Bring water and milk to a boil (the milk will foam, so stir and watch out!). Add grits and a few dashes of salt. Turn heat way down until grits are just simmering. Stir for about 5 minutes.
When the grits have thickened, add a spoonful of butter or two—if you used skim milk, go for two—and a handful of shredded or grated cheese. I’m fond of plain old sharp orange cheddar, but if you wanted to be shmancy and Continental, you could use gorgonzola or parmesan (this is, after all, pretty much identical to making polenta). If you can’t have cheese, I’m terribly sorry. You can make this with vegan cheese, but it’s harder to get vegan cheese to melt easily, so your end result might be a little stringy or oily.
Just before serving, stir in as much cayenne pepper as you personally like. If you don’t like hot pepper, I do not judge you, but SRSLY, the heat makes cheese grits even better. Or you can just douse them in the hot sauce of your choice after the fact.
Serve with eggs, or just by itself. A thick version of cheese grits has also been served in my family for Thanksgiving dinner in a casserole dish with a little melted cheese on the top (cook on the stovetop, put in casserole, run under broiler for a few minutes).
Oh, girl, now you’re talking. I could eat breakfast 3 times a day-and sometimes I do!
My dilemma when going out for breakfast/brunch is always choosing between sweet and savory. Happily, my family and I have devised a strategy. Those who want to do so pair off. One person orders a sweet dish, the other a savory, and they trade off halfway through. One morning we did a 4 way-lox scramble, eggs over easy with chicken apple sausage, oatmeal pancakes, and challah French toast with peach preserves. Oh baby…
Oh, and I make challah French toast every Sunday for Mr MM, Son of MM, and anyone else who’s around. Son gets duck bacon with his.
During Passover, nothing beats matzah brei sprinkled with sugar.
i love breakfast! Because of our schedules, Mr. Boxer and I have weekday morning breakfast date – it works so much better than trying to get home some evening at the same time with enough energy to go somewhere. Never mind the expectations tied up in a Saturday night date! But Tuesday morning breakfast at IHOP? No expectations except yummy food and conversations about nothing in particular. It’s my favorite thing.
My kids and I are not breakfast at breakfast time eaters… however we LOVE breakfast for dinner! Thank goodness there is a family pancake restaurant 15 min. away that we often have dinner at during the school year, before evening kid activities.
When I was growing up, I lived on a family dairy farm. We worked from about 6/7am on the weekends until 10/11am (weekends only obviously because of school). At that point we all ate a HUGE meal. As the youngest, and the GIRL, I was expected to help put out this huge meal at a young age. It usually involved eggs (fried or scrambled or hardboiled), bratwurst (yes, it was in WI, how did you guess?), homemade waffles, cheese, cereal, juice, and various fruits.
FTR, we ate another huge meal of dinner type foods around 4/5pm before going out to do evening chores (all the time, not just weekends). A snack at 9/10pm before bed covered it.
To this day I still get hungry around 10 / 11am.
Becky, did you know you can make cheesy polenta in the microwave? I’m so serious. It is my new go-to lazy night dinner.
Anyway, my daily breakfast is yogurt. Yogurrrrt….so good…tangy and full of protein…I’ve been relying on Trader Joe’s yogurt+granola cups, but I think soon I will try mixing my own granola and adding that to plain yogurt with some fruit preserves. Really great way to start the day. Also, oatmeal in the winter. And tea with local honey, always. On more luxurious mornings, my boyf likes pancakes — if I have time I make Mark Bittman’s fancy pancake recipe with whipped egg whites. Very fluffy inside, nice crisp outsides. We plan on this for tomorrow…I’m excited.
Eggs benedict poached soft, maple bacon, hashbrowns. That is all.
I love breakfast! I could eat an omelette at any time of the day. I don’t always have time to eat breakfast before I leave the house so I bring granola and yogurt with me. If I don’t eat in the morning, I’ll be sleepy and cranky at lunchtime. I make frittatas every month or so, but The Dude and I usually eat them for dinner as opposed to breakfast. Although, I think they’re more of an any-time-of-the-day meal.
@mischiefmanager – Whenever a group of friends and I go to a restaurant that serves crepes, I make sure that we order both sweet and savory as I can never decide which to get.
I was never much of a breakfast eater. These days since I *have* to be functional between the hours of 9 and noon, I’ve become a fan of the Jiffy muffin mixes. A box of mix, a little milk, and one egg gives you a half dozen muffins, which means 2 or 3 breakfasts for about a dollar. That’s a plus since my student loan situation is a bit dicey at the moment.
Back in ye olden days I was a big proponent of chocolate chip pancakes–the more whipped cream the better.
Mmmm, I love breakfast! I usually cook up something at least one of the days on the weekend. My current fave is buckwheat pancakes.
If you buy buckwheat flour, store it in the fridge or freezer to keep it fresh.
1/2 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup buckwheat flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
1/2 cup butter
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
Combine dry ingredients and mix well. In another, larger bowl, melt butter, cool slightly and then add buttermilk and eggs and beat. Add dry ingredients and stir until just blended. Cook pancakes (I usually make them so they are about 4-5″ diameter. Enjoy with your favorite pancake toppings. They keep surprisingly well and are also good at dinner or in pancake sandwiches.
Makes about 4 servings (12-14 4″ pancakes)
Ooh. Breakfasts! My favorite, nostalgic breakfast is beans on toast. My English Grandma would make this for us kids, switching it up with creamed chipped beef on toast, and porridge with fruit. I”m a vegetarian now, so creamed chipped beef is out of the question.(I recall this being shockingly good, though it sounds gross.) The adults got eggs, bacon, toast, sausage, and coffee. Or creamed chipped beef on toast, if that was the kids breakfast. Like I said, that shit was GOOD.
Get a can of Heinz vegetarian baked beans(green label!), heat with a pinch of dried sage, pepper, mustard powder, and butter. Slather on toast, gobble up with a cup of milky tea. Mmm. So good. So simple.
I’ve noticed a recent trend in US blogs to say that people “could care less”. This doesn’t actually make sense as it implies they care a lot.
The phrase is “could NOT care less”.
And… porridge. With brown sugar and cream.
@esterhazy: Thanks for pointing out how me and us US bloggers continue to do it irregardless of grammatic standards.
Becky, I just upped my grits game by making cheesy bacony grits. My husband informed me that they were the best breakfast food I had ever made.
I adore breakfast food. Weekdays are usually cereal, granola, grits, or oatmeal. Weekends are usually hashbrowns, eggs, bacon, grits, and pastries. Of course, these days the real luxury for me is when my husband takes the kids out for breakfast while I lie in bed for two extra hours.
@BeckySharper You are clearly annoyed by my comment. Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend, it was just an observation.
I am a major smoothie lover, especially since I really don’t like to eat a big heavy thing early in the morning, but the years have taught me to never even think about skipping breakfast or I become an anxious, pissy wreck. This is my fave:
frozen strawberries, almond milk, cashew butter, protein powder
You can also throw in a handful of spinach or some liquid chlorophyll or something else green to make it even yummier and healthier.
Help me out here – what are grits? porrige oats? Sounds good to me!
@esterhazy and Becky: I think that locution is regional and/or cultural. It’s something my grandparents’ generation would say, with that especially snarky Yiddish tone.
@NessieMonster:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grits
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porridge
I’m not a fan of grits myself, but maybe I’ve just never had them prepared well. Any time I’ve eaten grits, they had the texture and flavor of library paste.
Porridge oats are steel-cut and take longer to cook than the flaked variety used in oatmeal. To my mind, there is no bad variety of oatmeal, especially if it’s in a cookie!
I thought I hated grits until I moved to the South and discovered creamy grits. What I wouldn’t give for a bowl of shrimp and grits with tasso gravy, preferably from my favorite restaurant cross-town, home of the equally-amazing praline bacon…
My all-time favorite breakfast, though, is the Costa Rican / Nicaraguan desayuno tradicional: gallo pinto (rice with black or red beans, depending on the country) topped with Salsa Lizano and crema (really thick sour cream), a fried egg, and some fruit, sometimes served with maduros (ripe green plantain) or fried hard cheese (especially in Nica). I made a big batch of Tico-style (black bean) gallo pinto over the weekend and omg it’s so delicious!
Oops, make that maduros = fried ripe plantain (green plantain makes patacones or tostones)
Mmmmm, all the meals/recipies sound delicious!
As a lover of food, and especially of breakfast, there’s a whole bunch of food out there I need to taste.. I must go to there!
@MischiefManager Thank you for the explanation. I had started to hear the alternate version a lot recently, so I wondered if the phrase was evolving of its own accord in the US, but it sounds like it has been around for a while.
@NessieMonster With such a Scottish sounding name, I’m not surprised porridge oats sounds good to you