Writing about breakfast?

[This is for the “do something with” community challenge run by Herba and Die Pö. Sorry, no pictures.]

There’s this thing: In order to eat breakfast, you’ve gotta be awake. My body just: doesn’t. I wake up mean, nasty, and unhappy (doesn’t matter how much sleep I’ve had, the first half hour is poisonous). Woe to you if you’re in my presence. It takes me a long time to wake up and then I have no appetite. The thought of eating or drinking nauseates me. Especially anything cooked. Until I’ve been awake for several hours. At which point I’m suddenly starving and crazily thirsty and experience another mood crash.

(I’m also from an entire family of cheerful early risers. Weekdays dad eats with his posse in a local diner, but on days when he is going to be home for breakfast, I prepare his before I go to bed and he microwaves it in the morning. Apparently that’s still preferable than him learning how to cook his own.)

There are plenty of breakfast foods I really enjoy, but not in the morning. Just thinking about eating breakfast at breakfast time makes me feel vaguely resentful. If you’re thinking, but I’ve had breakfast with you and I survived, remember that you’re among the lucky.

So I snarled my way through childhood and high school mornings. In college I realized I couldn’t keep on this way, and then, too, I had moved to the birthplace of the breakfast taco, so I started eating a single, small bean and cheese taco for breakfast if I had a morning class. That was pretty ideal. However, it only really works as a strategy if you’re living in a dorm or a place near where someone is making them.

In grad school, sadly, I moved away from the tacos, and so switched to Quaker Instant Oatmeal. One envelope, a little water, microwave, done in a minute in my apartment, and it thankfully doesn’t take long to eat. The issue also got a little less acute, in that almost nothing that happens in graduate school happens in the early morning (unless you’re teaching).

Finally, after grad school, my college bestie was reading an article about people who are homicidal upon waking and said, “this sounds like you.” I’m not going to link to the associated theory, which I suspect is pseudo-science, but the person’s idea was that people who had this problem should eat as much protein and as little carbohydrate as possible in the morning. Then, before going to bed, one should eat a small potato. Something about smoothing out blood sugar levels.

This was pretty miraculous for me. I always go for the high protein breakfast, and if I have to be polite in the morning, I eat a small potato the night before, which makes me about 50 percent less dysphoric. I still don’t enjoy eating at that time of day. The main difference I have noticed is that I have much more energy in the mornings and I don’t have the late morning crash anymore.

So for breakfast, because I don’t like to have to cook in the morning, I almost always have the same thing: cottage cheese. In the summer with tomato wedges or cherry tomatoes. Maybe every fifth time or so I have unsweetened yogurt. If I’m out of cottage cheese I eat some other kind of cheese. (We’re never really short of cheese. A lot of times dad’s been out and brought home some cheese curds, which for some reason are very cheery to eat in the morning, although OMG the salt.) Very rarely I get my act together and have overnight oats, which I love, but which tend to be sweeter and not as high in protein. If I’m in a place with breakfast tacos, I will have a bean and cheese or egg and cheese.

Proofreading this made me feel grumpy. You see, the effect breakfast has on me?

Think of it this way: more breakfast for you. Cheers!

So what are your breakfast foibles?

~ by Servetus on January 28, 2018.