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The Great Breakfast Dilemna

I have a confession to make. Actually, it’s two confessions.

Firstly, I am not a morning person. That’s right, I am one of ‘those’ people who they make coffee mugs and bumper stickers for that say things like ‘All the Coffee in Columbia Won’t Make Me a Morning Person’ and ‘Good Morning is an Oxymoron’. I generally take a long time to wake up and just don’t function that well until after breakfast. I am blessed with a great husband who recognizes this limitation of mine and does the morning routine with the girls.

This leads to my second confession. I am not a breakfast person. (Is this a surprise?) I never have been. I don’t particularly enjoy traditional breakfast foods and spent the majority of my college years having dinner leftovers for breakfast. Not because I was lazy, but I just thought it would be better to have something I actually liked rather than skip breakfast, which was my other option.

Many years (let’s not talk about how many), a husband and three kids later, I still have THE BREAKFAST DILEMNA to contend with. For various reasons that include teaching them healthy eating habits, making sure they have enough energy and concentration for school, general good nutrition and trying to shed a few pounds, I know that having breakfast is very important. Not only is having breakfast important, but having a GOOD breakfast is important.

When we first had the kids, the hubs and I talked about how we’d like to do things. We are both amateur foodies and agreed that breakfast should be balanced, not just a bowl of cereal. This was easy for the first few years, but now, the kids are in school and the mornings can feel more like Army bootcamp than the relaxed family breakfast time that we’d like it to be. Somewhere along the way, the balanced breakfast has given way to…you guessed it, a lone bowl of cereal and milk. It’s easy, and most of the time. the kids like it. We also give them oatmeal in the winter, but again, it’s a variation on the cereal theme, and it’s high carb and unbalanced. I have blood sugar issues so usually have an egg and toast…every…..morning……

This is not because we don’t like other foods. It’s mostly just a function of the path of least resistance.

This week we’re trying something different. It’s our first Breakfast Experiment of the year. Last year we tried something similar, and I found some breakfast foods from around the world. I thought this would be a good teaching moment to educate the kids about other cultures and have some interesting foods at the same time.  I wanted to find a different country for every day and work my way around the world. With so many countries, I figured we’d have a new and exciting breakfast every day for months. It was met with limited success and after the first couple of weeks, it was very time consuming to keep researching new foods and the idea fizzled out. I might resurrect it again this year, but for now,  I’m happy to try a simpler experiment.

So every day this week, we are going to try a breakfast that doesn’t involve any cereal. This leaves out healthy options like meusli but I think a healthy cereal experiment might be something to try later.

The criteria for the No-Cereal Breakfast Experiment are:

1. Quick. All of the recipes take under a half hour to make, except for one which includes sitting time overnight and baking in the morning, but since it’s just time in the oven, I don’t really count that. You can easily be doing other things in the morning while it’s baking.
2. Nutritionally Balanced. I am trying recipes that have a mix of protein and carbohydrate and not too much fat. I won’t say they’re necessarily ‘low-fat’ but this isn’t diet food, just normal healthy food.
3. Kid-Approved. My kids eat most things, but they can be fickle and like something one day and not the next. Since this is only a one week experiment, we’ll see how that goes. In the interest of science, I’ll probably repeat the trial a few more times to make sure they definitely do or don’t like something.

So join me tomorrow when I report on Day 1 of Yummy Weekday Breakfast Ideas (Hold the Cereal, Please)

See you then!