Breakfast
My dad was the breakfast-maker when I was growing up. Never anything fancy: boiled eggs, rye toast, kasha, and in the summer, cornflakes with strawberries.
I continue the basic breakfast trend. Granola and fresh fruit, oatmeal and nuts, or toast with almond butter. But I use only the best bread: St John’s Bakery, or Dufferin Grove Park’s. The granola is from Harbord Bakery, rich and moist, and the strawberries are local.
The Anti-Poverty Organizer has been known to make me perfect French toast, with Portuguese cornbread and Ontario maple syrup, yogurt and fruit. The Blue-Eyed Stranger makes me the best homefries I’ve ever eaten, and pancakes so light yet wholewheaty they practically float over the plate. When I visit my ma, it’s eggs every morning, fried in a ton of butter, or perfectly boiled, the ubiquitous rye toast filling out the plate.
The Guitar Player made fantastic scrambled eggs. The folks at Fanny Bay produce smoothies that sing. The gay boys running Inn on Somerset in Ottawa leave you to your thoughts at breakfast, and quietly place a plate of queerly over-the-top stuffed baked eggs in front of you.
I get fancier with guests. Frittata with feta cheese, tomatoes and olives. Montreal bagels, cream cheese and lox. Mushroom cheese omelette. For The Novelist, once, I even attempted French toast. The crunch and rustle of the Saturday paper. And always, creamy lattes made with organic espresso.
Breakfast is pre-discursive, intuitive, non-linear. Breakfast is looser, less rule-bound than any other meal. I love breakfast. Breakfast is love.
Has anyone made you breakfast lately? What will you make for yourself? For someone else? Where will you eat it, and what will it be?
my lover made me an omelet this morning, light and tender and perfectly stuffed with leeks, mushrooms, tomatoes, and cheese. it was special: she’s visiting me while i sojourn in australia, and though she arrived much earlier in the month, we’d been on the road almost every day since then… breakfast has been pieces of weet-bix dunked in instant coffee while leaning against the van. now we have a kitchen at our disposal, and i am thrilled to be spoiled by her.
… and the Scrabble Player makes french toast with home-made challah…
From my blog:
“Saturday morning, when I’m on duty, I always volunteer to cook breakfast. There’s a perscribed menu for meals, but all the cottages are stocked with good spice cabinets, and if I happen to have leftover ingredients from other meals, I try to do something special. As staff, we spend so much time teaching and curbing and interfering, sometimes I think we forget to be creative when showing how much we love and care about the kids. So I do this breakfast thing, something small, something they’ll smile about when they wake up, and remember all the way to bedtime. This week, I made apple cinnamon pancakes, with plenty of vanilla and nutmeg and fresh apples. I got the griddle at just the right heat for perfectly round golden cakes and cooked up a huge batch, trying to make the whole cottage smell good. One of my co-workers sat outside a child’s door and plucked out a tune on his guitar, motivating the kid through room-cleaning. I made up a song to his tune, about how my dad always makes pancakes on Saturday. I stopped in the middle when I felt the tears coming. I don’t even like pancakes as much as other breakfasts, but my dad’s pancakes are the biggest sign that everything in the world is Okay. And I know that no amount of cinnamon-flavored mornings are going to reassure these kids that everything is really Okay, but, my co-worker reminds me – we do what we do. Whether it’s guitar, or fixing bicycles or making up special nicknames and handshakes or even just the occasional pancake breakfast, we do whatever we can. And maybe, someday, we will be a piece of their story of how everything eventually became Okay.”
These days Peter and I are obsessed with good yogurt for breakfast, ie Liberty. He has granola and I have strawberries and chia seeds. The strawberries are picked from the garden the day before, allowed to ripen just short of too ripe and come in an assortment of odd shapes. For some reason one plant produces quasi modo strawberries only a mother would love. But love them I do. Our son gets whipped cream with his strawberries because he is very tired of yogurt right now. Ha! Funny how one never tires of whipped cream.
Just returned from a painting sojourn up at Haviland Bay, Lake Superior. The morning we started out on the 10 hour drive we cleaned out the fridge…so…I had leftover Sunset Shores Cook House lightly breaded and fried whitefish and lake trout; a yummy piece of birch and cedar smoky camp-fire grilled chicken marinated in tamari, grated ginger, sesame oil, lime juice…plus leftover local berry salad…I felt like Ms. Spring Sasquatch.