The Breakfast Quest

As a child I remember the constant emphasis of breakfast being the most important meal of the day.  When we took standardized tests at school, they even told us we would do better if we had eight hours of sleep and a good breakfast.  Not until college did I question the standard American breakfast.

Commercials always showed puffy cereals with fruit and milk, sometimes orange juice was included in this image.  There is an entire row in the grocery store devoted to this breakfast ideal.  Some with cinnamon, some in rainbow colors, coated in sugar, and floating along with marshmallows.  This type of meal often left me feeling hungry and unsatisfied.  Over the years I've been on the quest of finding true breakfast.  I've tried various types of oatmeals, that come in a variety of packaging including fancy tin cans.  Then there was the cream of wheat phase, followed by the granola phase.  The hippie name drew me in and made me feel as though it could quite possibly be the healthiest thing on the planet, then I read the amount of sugar, yikes!  I went from using milk to yogurt on my puffy cereals in hopes that the density of this milk product would aid in my feeling of satisfaction.

Then one day I found myself at Reevis Mountain School (founded and run by my dear friend Peter Bigfoot and his wife Patricia), where we sang in a circle prior to eating, all of the food was freshly harvested and served buffet style, and at the center of the table there were lots of herbs and seaweeds to sprinkle upon your food.  Eggs, root vegetables, and something green that reminded me of Popeye the Sailor Man, and quinoa, a grain that I neither knew how to spell or where it came from.  The whole meal was a culinary delight to my pallet.  I enjoyed every bite, I even slowed down and savored the flavors.  That green stuff turned out to be Swiss Chard, it wasn't my favorite, but I did take notice to how wonderful I felt.  Veggies for breakfast, who does that?  I blew off the whole experience as different and not something I could integrate into 'normal' life, after all I didn't have a great garden, an intern at my disposal, or the time to cook like this.

Later on I had this thought or ah-ha moment, if breakfast is the most important meal of the day and vegetables are so nutritious and as American's we never get enough into our diets, then wouldn't it make sense to start the day with vegetables?  Slowly I began integrating vegetables and grains into my breakfast diet.  Now I crave them, especially green leafy vegetables.  Not lettuce and definitely not iceberg "might-as-well-drink-water lettuce."  Greens, like Swiss Chard, Spinach, Collards, Turnip Greens, Beet Greens, Dandelions, yum.

I share this entry for any of you also on the breakfast quest as a beacon of hope.  A hope that we can all get away from puffy stuff.  Fluffy, sugary, flavored stuff.  There are wonderful things to eat in the morning.  Pete and I call it preventative health-care, we invest in ourselves with good food and take the time to prepare it.  My breakfast this morning consisted of: sauteed onions and beets, quinoa, two farm eggs (orange yokes not yellow runny yokes), all topped with dandelion greens.  Delicious, healthy, leaving me feeling good.  Feeling good about what I'm taking into my body, feeling good about the eating habit I'm passing on to my baby, and feeling physically and emotionally great!