Breakfast Manhattan

I thought a Breakfast Manhattan would be a generous portion of bourbon and vermouth atop a glass of orange juice.

Breakfast after Thanksgiving

So which makes the better breakfast?

In dish A, leftover stuffing and gravy.

In dish B, leftover mashed potatoes and gravy.

You will note the common ingredient, which makes anything taste better.  That's why we make gravy by the gallon when a turkey is anywhere in the vicinity.

I have a hard time choosing between the two, and plan to alternate breakfasts until I run out of something.

Rice cooker epic fail

I mentioned in my last post that I wanted to try making steelcut oatmeal in my rice cooker, supposedly a foolproof method.  I had a different result.

I measured out my regular quantity of ingredients: 1 cup oats, 4 cups water.  I usually make this in a saucepan somewhat smaller than my rice cooker bowl, so I thought it would work out OK.  But when you cook it in a pan, you watch and turn the heat down when it reaches a boil.  The rice cooker knows better, and just boils away till it thinks the food is done.

Unfortunately, as the oatmeal boiled, it boiled right out of the cooker.  Yuk.

I wiped up the mess and somehow finished cooking the oatmeal, which never achieved the proper texture.  Too bad I wasn't doing collage that day, because the goo was a wonderful paste, very difficult to get off the counter even with serious tools.

I don't know whether this was my fault for using too much oatmeal, or whether it happened because the cooker stayed too hot too long.  Also don't know whether I'll even bother to try again.  Steelcut oats take about 45 minutes to cook and I like to make four servings at a time (on subsequent days I heat them in the microwave).  Don't think it would be worth the time and trouble to make smaller batches in the rice cooker, since I can easily make four servings in the good old-fashioned pan.

French toast

When my kids were still at home, sharing a big breakfast was a common activity on the weekends.  Sometimes we just had eggs with sausage or bacon, other times we'd fix pancakes, waffles or french toast.  Of course I was the cook, while the guys sat at the table salivating for their grub.

With this setup, naturally I was the last to eat.  By the time I fed everybody, then fixed my own food and came to the table, the thrill was gone.  At least one guy was probably done and clamoring to be excused.  I got the pleasure of a nice plate of food, but the companionship of a shared meal was mostly gone.

Well, so much for companionship.  Let's focus in on the food.  The last egg out of the pan isn't qualitatively different from the first, and if you're vigilant in saving enough bacon for yourself, who cares if you're the last to eat?  Pancakes were problematical because you might run out of batter before you fed yourself, but over time you figured out how much to make.

With french toast, though, the first piece is different from the last.

There are two styles of french toast: puffy and crispy.  Puffy comes early in the day, from bread that has soaked up plenty of eggy milk and becomes airy and light in the frying pan.  Crispy comes at the end of the road, when there isn't much eggy milk left and thus the leavening effect of the eggs is weaker.  You get nice fried bread, but it's not exactly french toast.

The cook gets crispy, even when the cook might prefer puffy.

After decades of wanting puffy and getting crispy, I decided to pull the plug on french toast for a crowd.  Since I was the one who loved it the best, and I was the one who never got the perfect plateful, I changed my approach.  Now I make french toast only for myself, and I get the puffy ones.

When it's just me, I use one egg and some milk.  That's good for two or three slices of bread, depending on the size and thickness of the bread.  I usually add a schluck of vanilla to the eggy milk, which gives a nice flavor boost.  I never use syrup, just a bit of salt at the table.  It's delicious, and good enough for dinner if I'm all by myself.

Fine breakfasts of the past

I've written before about my fascination with breakfast.  I like to eat a good, healthy, filling breakfast, but am continually frustrated in my efforts to identify what that might be composed of -- and to find same in my kitchen when I get up in the morning.  I don't eat sweet things, which rules out a large portion of the "standard" breakfast foods: donuts, muffins, cereal with sugar, waffles with syrup. 

But every now and then you run into a delicious combination.  I found one on a cruise ship earlier this year, and to my great delight, found it repeated every three or four days.

Here's another one that showed up now and then on the rotation.  I know, I know, these would all be healthier without the bacon, but I don't think life would be worth living without bacon.

Unfortunately, since returning home I haven't figured out how to make either of these breakfasts reliably appear on my plate in the morning.

Bad ideas in breakfast

I spend a lot of time thinking about breakfast.  I know that in my lifetime I have gone through many phases of favorite breakfast foods, adopting some product or preparation as my default and eating it every day for weeks or months.  At least before I retired, breakfast was one of the most stressful meals of the day.  Being getting-up-challenged, I was always running late, always under pressure, always willing to trade off a decent breakfast for an extra ten minutes in bed.  Even when I took the time to eat something, I rarely sat down to do so. 

I know this pattern is not a healthy one.  Now that I live a life of alleged leisure, I eat better at breakfast, if only because I can take my time about it.  But I'm still interested in (and often concerned about) the things that the Big Food Industry tries to sell us for breakfast.

Here's what I found on prominent display the other day in our deli/bakery department:

I looked more closely to see what this product was.

"A healthy and delicious way to start your day" -- well, maybe delicious, but hardly healthy.  Check out the label:

How about those carbs?  If you're trying to lose weight, this could be your entire daily dose of carbohydrate, or even twice your daily dose. 

By contrast, a big bowl of steelcut oatmeal has 27 grams of carbs, and 1 gram of sugar -- half the fat of the breakfast cookie, and only 5% of the sugar.

One cookie has 320 calories, with 100 of them from fat.  By contrast, the oatmeal has 150 calories, with 25 of them from fat.  Even if you pour some decadent "fat-free half-and-half" over the top, you'll add 50 calories, with zero from fat.

Heck, you might as well just eat a regular oatmeal cookie -- 218 calories, 80 of them from fat, and a tad less sodium.

But of course, it's hard to eat a bowl of oatmeal in the car while you're driving.  Or to keep it in your desk drawer for days when you arrive at work unfed and cranky.

Nevertheless, I think this is on balance a bad idea.

Breakfast on the road

It's gotten expected that practically every mid-range motel offers free breakfast with your room.  Years ago that could be pretty nice, at least in some places.  But these days, free breakfast is often an exercise in hunting and gathering.  What can you find, amid the flotsam and jetsam of the food processing industry, that you might actually want to ingest?

The mainstay of free breakfasts is always the donut platter, where you can get your sugar levels back up to diabetic range in case they have fallen during the night. 

Some chains are famous for their waffles, which I think are popular with visitors partly because of the elaborate procedure for measuring out the batter, pouring it into the very hot iron (avoiding second-degree burns, if possible), flipping it over, listening for the beeps, and decanting it onto your plate.  And of course, the ever-present danger that you will do something wrong and open the waffle iron to find a messy, half-baked pile of dough that has to be forcibly removed.

There's often cereal, in those pitiful packages that rip open to reveal a dish-like receptacle, into which you can pour some milk, providing you didn't tear it too far open.  In my experience, mostly you have a choice of three overly sugared varieties.

On a recent journey we discovered a new breakfast treat: pre-formed omelets ready for your microwave pleasure.  Somehow we resisted their allure.

A good breakfast -- was Mom right?

How many times did your mom tell you to eat a good breakfast?  How many times did you tell that to your kids?  How many times have you heard that you should eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a gentleman and dinner like a pauper?  How many times have they told you that if you want to lose weight, you should make sure to eat a good breakfast?

Well, maybe all those times were exercises in misinformation.

The New York Times reports that researchers in Germany studied a group of obese adults, plus a control group of normal-weight.  "For both groups," the story says, "a large breakfast simply added to the number of daily calories they consumed. Whether they ate a large breakfast, a small one or none at all, their nonbreakfast calorie intake remained the same."

So if you, like me, occasionally find yourself sitting there at 11:30 a.m. still nursing your tea, not having eaten yet, and maybe just starting to think about food -- don't feel guilty about that good breakfast you missed!!!  Wait for lunch, proceed normally, and feel smug about the calories you didn't eat. 

Sorry, Mom doesn't approve

As a mom myself, I am always alert to advertisements that take my name in vain.  Such as the flyer we got in the mail last week from McDonald's, announcing that "Mom Would Approve" the breakfast sandwiches pictured, and pushed with coupons on the back of the flyer.

Well, not this mom. 

I don't want my kids or anybody else eating a sausage biscuit with egg, 500 calories, 58% of them from fat, and 1080 mg of sodium (that's more than 2/3 of the daily maximum for healthy diets).  Or a sausage McMuffin with egg, 450 calories, 53% of them from fat, and 930 mg of sodium.  Or a sausage egg and cheese McGriddle, 560 calories, 50% of them from fat, and 1290 mg of sodium.

What surprised me on my calculator-armed visit to the McDonald's nutrition website was that the huge sodium dose from those two breakfasts does not come from the sausage patty, which I would have expected from highly seasoned cured meat.  That has only 310 mg of sodium -- but the biscuit alone has 680!  The egg McMuffin has 850 mg of sodium, while adding sausage adds only 80 mg more.

Suppose you need a sugar jolt in the morning and order a deluxe warm cinnamon roll.  That gives you 590 calories, but only 36% of them come from fat.  Does that make you feel healthy?  It shouldn't, because that roll contains 36 grams of sugar -- almost as much as a 12-ounce can of industrial-strength Coke.  (And how many of those cinnamon roll eaters are washing them down with a large industrial-strength Coke?)

You can hit the junk food trifecta -- fat, sugar and sodium -- by ordering hotcakes and sausage.  Even without your Coke chaser, that will deliver 770 calories, 39% of them from fat, 930 mg of sodium and 45 grams of sugar.

Maybe you'd like a McCafe hot chocolate, featured in the coupons, with your sausage biscuit.  If you order the large, it'll bring 460 calories, 35% of them from fat, and 54 grams of sugar. 

In the name of moms everywhere, I take offense at being used to endorse breakfasts that are tasty, convenient, cheap, and a one-way ticket to a cardiac bypass, if diabetes doesn't get you first.  But it isn't just McDonald's that wants us to do the wrong thing.  Our whole food system socializes us to want fats and sweets for breakfast -- and has even brainwashed us into thinking that's a nutritious way to start the day.

I've been thinking a lot lately about breakfast, and what we really should be eating for good nutrition.  Not sure I have the answer yet, but I know it isn't McGriddles breakfast sandwiches.

The product police -- packaging department

Do you ever get the feeling that food manufacturers would be just as happy if your food spills or goes stale before you eat it all?  If ever there was a good place for a zip lock bag, it's inside a box of breakfast cereal or frozen waffles.  But no, that might add a penny to the (already inflated) cost.

I needed a new box of grits last week and paranoid as always, checked the price on the shelf before buying.  Discovered that it was 15 cents cheaper to buy a rectangular box than a cardboard cylinder with the same quantity.  And since I hadn't thrown out my old cardboard cylinder yet, this morning I decanted the new grits into the old box.  Ha!  It isn't every day you get to outwit the product police!

So what do people do who buy the rectangular box of grits?  As you can see, the top was so enthusiastically glued down that I had to tear it open.  I guess if you didn't save your cardboard cylinder box you could decant into a mason jar.  Which might even be a better idea than saving your cylinder, because it would protect against little vermin.  (Ever found your flour or Bisquick infested?  I have.  No fun.)

Anyway, the grits were great on this chilly morning of the first frost, served up in my official grits bowl, a heavy pottery number that holds the heat for a while.  I like mine runny enough so it would be hard to eat them with a fork, with butter and a tiny pinch of sea salt with pepper.