Breakfast of Champions

07Apr08

I am not a natural breakfast eater, despite the fact that I’m thoroughly aware of the benefits of regular breakfast consumption. Breakfast usually seems like an unnecessary prelude to the real food, lunch. Lunch is Reuben’s and enchiladas and bowls of soup, breakfast is cold cereal and yogurt, neither of which repulse me but neither of which thrill me in the way that sandwiches do. I will inevitably do an entire post singing the praises of sandwiches.

Recently however, I have embraced breakfast, though my breakfast is usually sometime around noon, due to my terrible terrible sleeping habits. But it is morning to me and breakfast none the less. The first breakfast I had this week was a particularly ambitious one of Live! Raw! Foods! I am a very big fan of kombucha and despite the lack of recorded scientific evidence to back up its claimed health benefits, I feel good about drinking it. I have considered making my own kombucha, but given that kombucha has a great potential to be most unpalatable due to the strong taste of vinegar, I stick with the store bought variety. So, with the happy knowledge that I was ingesting a myriad of probiotics, this was my first breakfast in what I hoped to be a new found love of breakfast at large.

Feeling far too healthy, the next day I made Soft Scrambled Eggs with Fresh Ricotta and Chives.

I used two eggs from local producers Sequatchie Cove, fresh chives, and Natural by Nature Ricotta. I served them over two French baguette rounds with a little bit of fleur de sel. This was an exceedingly easy recipe, and all in all the entire preparation of them took maybe ten minutes. As delicious as this breakfast was, the previous probiotic rich breakfast left me with much higher self-esteem.

The third breakfast this week, today’s breakfast of espresso and a stroop waffle, was more of an exercise in nostalgia than cooking or nutrition. I utilized our much neglected espesso machine, at least neglected by me, though not by E., who often makes coffee with the more pleb side of the machine. I guess it’s a lot like the treadmill in the basement, which is also paid lots of attention by E. and is sadly neglected by me. Oh the poor machines.

I digress. After cursing the stupid machine for not making espresso on my first try, I recalled that I had neglected to put any water in. After putting water in, the machine spitefully still refused to make espresso for reasons unknown to me. Finally, after much waiting, thick black coffee dribbled out of the two spouts (inexplicably, as I expressly stated to the machine that I was only making one cup). Luckily, my one cup was able to catch both streams, resulting in a delicious double shot. In addition to not being much of a breakfast person, I am also not much of a coffee drinker. This is not due to a lack of love for coffee, which I have, but to the fact that any amount of caffeine makes me twitchy in a most unpleasant, anxious way. Generally decaf is all I will imbibe, but I braved caffeine this morning, namely due to a lack of decaf espresso beans (which just seems wrong anyway).

While on espresso I want to ask: why in god’s name to do so many people insist on calling it “expresso”? Why the hell do they do it? Because it makes you go fast? Nothing irks me more. Well, lots of things irk me more, but when I hear a server offering someone a cup of “expresso” all I can do is /facepalm. However, I seem to be alone in this, as most people I work with seem to think this is completely acceptable. Am I wrong? Is this an alternative and canonized word for espresso? Is it a southernism? Please, let me know if I am in the wrong here, but in the mean time I’m going to assume I am totally correct.

I chose a prized stroop waffle to accompany my espresso, which I had recently purchased (along with many other hard to find foreign food treasures) at a trip to World Market with my mom. I have spent long stints in the Netherlands off and on since I was 17 and the stroop waffles at tea time were my absolute favorite, and I miss them sorely. One can imagine my excitement upon discovering them right here in Tennessee. I put on The Books: The Lemon of Pink, and prepared to eat my breakfast in sublime peace, but that was not to be as our puppy, Moses, took to ramming his head into the side of the table for the duration of my meal. Puppy induced table quakes aside, it was a soothing breakfast.

+

+

= breakfast of champions

Breakfast in general makes me feel like I’m about to do something important, which is generally not the case, but I like the feeling and plan to continue creating and consuming breakfast for the time being.

Filed under: Food Stuffs   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: breakfast, cooking, eating, eggs, food, kombucha, probiotics, the books