John, over at his site, John Is Fit recently posted an article on breakfast cereal. It’s a good post, with a pointed take on the subject of breakfast. It got me thinking about my own breakfast choices.
A Traditional Southern Breakfast
As a kid growing up, my parents generally had a hot, nutritious breakfast. And I do mean hot — homemade biscuits, sausage, bacon, and gravy. We also had our choice of honey (from our own beehives), sourghum, molasses, and homemade strawberry jam. As far as I was concerned, it was a gourmet breakfast, and that’s what I had every morning. It was great for a growing boy. So then I went to college, and dorm life isn’t exactly conducive to that, so I started experimenting. I discovered that I just didn’t like cereal too much, but Captain Crunch would do in a pinch. Not too filling, but tasted great. Breakfast nutrition wa
s sorely lacking, but I wasn’t too concerned about it at that stage. Coming out of college and going to graduate school got me started on a daily bagel with cream cheese and a large Coke. I had no clue there were so many calories in a bagel. Eventually, living on my own left me returning to cooking the breakfast of my childhood. That didn’t work too well for me. I started to pick up weight pretty fast. By that point, I wasn’t growing up anymore, but I sure started to grow out… I was also eating a midmorning snack, group lunches, and occasionally a big dinner.
For a while, I tried the high protein diets. That left me having eggs and bacon for breakfast every morning. It was OK for a while, but eventually I decided that was boring. So, now I’ve progressed to my breakfast smoothie. Between those and a high fiber cereal like Oatmeal Squares, that makes up breakfast most days. I’ve tried some of the other high fiber cereals, and I’ll switch to one for a while, but I can’t do them for long. To paraphrase a friend of mine, “…most of them taste like grass…”
However, a few times a month, we still break out the biscuit pan and cook that traditional southern breakfast. It’s just too good to give up completely.
OMG, I love biscuits and gravy. Biscuits and anything, really. I was in the Memphis airport recently on a layover in the morning and they have a BBQ restaurant there by Jim Neely that was servings simple breakfast sandwiches of a biscuit and sausage. My wife ordered one and I had a bite. Wow, was it good. We stopped in Memphis again on the way home and I waited in line to get one only to learn they only served them for breakfast! Probably better off though…
My wife and I once had an argument about who could cook the biscuits and gravy. I was cooking breakfast, (biscuits and gravy, of course), and she wanted to make sure I made it right (meaning how she like them). After much arguing, we discovered that we made them the same way… Needless to say, we take our biscuits and gravy seriously…