jimsjournal
What's for breakfast? -- 12/09/06


I love big breakfasts -- two or three fried eggs, bacon, pancakes with maple syrup, toast bread or toasted English muffins with butter and jelly, a tall glass of juice (orange or grapefruit or pineapple) and lots and lots of hot black coffee.

Of course in the interest of not adding two or three pounds per week and maintaining good levels of cholesterol and such, I very very rarely eat a breakfast like that. Maybe only once or twice a year.

On days that I go to the office -- which, this year, has been about once a month -- my habit has become to stop at a Dunkin Donuts and get one of their egg and bagel sandwiches (toasted whole wheat bagel, fried egg, cheese, bacon) which I eat as I drive, plus a large black coffee and a donut (a glazed stick donut if they have them) to take to the office.

Most mornings at home I eat cold cereal with skim milk -- usually something like Raisin Nut Bran or Raisin Bran Crunch (note the "crunch" in the name, I can't stand regular Raisin Bran -- in fact, I hate any cereal that gets soggy in milk, it has to keep some crunchiness or I can't eat it).

Nancy goes through periods when she eats hot oatmeal cereals -- and then goes back to eating cold cereal for months at a time, and then changes back to hot cereal. Last year she had Quaker instant oatmeal cereal most mornings but this year she has been eating cold cereal. A week or so ago she said she was interested in trying "real" oatmeal -- that is, not the rolled oats (like Quaker) that have been steamed and rolled and steamed again and then toasted before being put into boxes, instead she wanted to try steel-cut oats (the whole grain inner part cut into two or three pieces by steel disks) which are supposed to have more natural goodness (or whatever) being less processed.

So I bought a can of McCann's Original Steel-Cut Irish Oatmeal. And then it sat on the kitchen counter all week because I didn't the time to cook it. (Bring to boil while stirring, then simmer for 30 minutes while stirring occasionally.)

On weekends I figure there is more time, no rush to work, etc. so I often like to fix eggs (or sometimes French toast or pancakes) on a Saturday or a Sunday morning. So this morning I got up and gulped down my first cup of coffee and brought Nancy a cup and asked her if she would be interested in some scrambled eggs. She said no, but she would really be interested in trying the steel-cut oatmeal. I told her okay, and she even had time to catch some more sleep...
Four cups of water, one cup of oatmeal...

So that's what Nancy had for breakfast... with organic vanilla soy milk and some Craisins... and she liked it. (No, she didn't eat the entire batch -- the idea is that you can make, say, four servings worth, eat one and put the rest in the refrigerator and later add milk or whatever and microwave it.)

I did try a spoonful and found it much more palatable than any other hot cereal I've ever tried -- it actually has some texture to it -- and I think if I stirred a lot of fruit (such as blueberries) into to it, I might even eat a serving of it -- but I'd still rather have cold crunchy cereal.

Oh... and while I was fixing the oatmeal, I made myself a breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast bread with strawberry jelly, and a glass of pineapple juice. (And lots of black coffee, of course.)

So... what do you have for breakfast?



Blasts from the past -- selected entries from the archives for this date:



My Holidailies entry number nine!
A brief introduction....
A brief introduction to anyone who wanders in here for the first time from the Holidailies site -- I'm a middle-aged (*cough* okay, 63, but I don't look a day over 62 ) guy who lives in Rhode Island with my wife Nancy (a middle-school math teacher), daughter Gillian ("Jill" -- 24 yr old college student), son Jeremy (21 yr old college student), and Tiger (senior citizen cat). Eldest child Adam lives in New York City with his wife Leah and our grandson Sam. I'm a former programmer/systems analyst who got into doing software training and currently works from home doing quality assurance and editing on course material for both classroom courses and Web-based training courses. I've been writing this online journal since 1996. (If you read some of the archived entries, until a couple of years ago I used fake names for the kids -- "Sean" = Jeremy and "Jennifer" = Gillian)



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