Breakfast Thoughts

Ida Holmbom from Sweden wrote to me asking me to contribute to her breakfast blog .  Other people ask my advice as a writer, from time to time.  Here it is: never waste words.  A sentence worth writing is worth publishing twice...

Tea.  Assam.  Harmutty Gold.  I don't eat breakfast - sometimes in the early hours a chocolate biscuit - breakfast perhaps or late tea.  No appetite in the morning at all.  Just assam brewed for 3 minutes.  No milk, no sugar.  White bone china mug.  Later on green tea (Dragon Well or mao jian) and later still Darjeeling (Castleton, second flush).

Except: when I'm away and then my ascetic morning needs bloom into ravening greed.  For choice an American breakfast: sausage, pancakes, hash browns, eggs over easy...or in England the UK equivalent of a fryup: sausage, bacon, eggs, fried bread (I can do without the baked beans), a grilled kidney even.  Though the right kind of caff is no longer on every corner.  My breakfast tastes when I'm away are remarkably eclectic.  I even take pleasure in those damp slices of white sliced toast with unpalatable mass produced marmalade in small pots.  I can't say why.  I also like pork scratchings, though not for breakfast.

Muesli, on the other hand, I won't eat anywhere.  For a while I was at a vegetarian boarding school where huge tin bowls of wet pasty oats and dried fruit slopped about on the breakfast tables.  Pale vomit.  No matter how fashionable or organic or life-saving muesli becomes, I will not eat it.  Porridge, on the other hand, I will eat - at home before bed sometimes; away, for breakfast, with or without a kipper.

I have discovered though that eating breakfast makes me hungry.  If I eat in the morning, I'm ravenous a couple of hours later.  If I just have tea, it can get to mid-afternoon before I start feeling hungry. Actually, eating always makes me feel hungry.

Comments

[KateJ]

One thing I always have for breakfast if I'm away from home - at hotels in Britain anyway - are those grapefruit segments in juice. I'd never dream of having them at home... fresh grapefruit maybe, but tinned? Never! They are something that only seem to exist on hotel breakfast menus. I remember breakfasts in seaside B&Bs when you'd be asked 'flakes or segments?'
Me, I'm a segment person, always will be.

[Meredith]

What is an over easy egg anyway?