Feed me!

[jadesfire]

Tell me, O Wise and Wonderful Flist, what do you have for breakfast?

I've always had problems with this, as too much dairy (milk or yoghurt) makes me rather nauseous first thing in the morning. Porridge leaves me hungry, even when I put fruit or syrup on it, and the only thing I've found that really works is a bacon/sausage sandwich, but I don't really want to be eating that much processed meat. I tried yoghurt and ryvita for a while, but... Well. There's only so much crispbread a girl can eat.

So what do you have? Are you a cereal person? Toast? Smoothie? All and any suggestions gratefully received!

Comments

[travels_in_time]

Coffee. :D With almond milk, as dairy gives me stomach problems also, early in the morning.

[jadesfire]

Heh, while coffee must be involved, if there is not also food, I have a tendency to (literally) keel over by mid-morning, which is alarming for all concerned.

OTOH, I hadn't considered almond milk instead of dairy. I quite like cereal, so I wonder if that could be a solution - I'm not sure if it's the dairy component or the liquid. Time for SCIENCE :) Thanks.

[white_hart]

Muesli and yoghurt, normally. Or bread and jam, if there is bread. Or occasionally toast with peanut butter and Marmite (two pieces of toast with one of them each, not mixed), but I mostly can't be bothered to play toaster roulette.

If protein-based things work better for you, have you considered going Northern European and having bread with cheese and ham?

[jadesfire]

...toaster roulette?

Muesli is definitely a popular choice. I quite like it dry, so may ignore the whole 'that's kind of weird' vibe and just eat it. Or, as you say, bread with cheese or ham could work. I can't each much gluten, but a decent rye bread would be good. I'm leaning towards a small portion of muesli at home, walking to work for the exercise, then having a ham/cheese light sandwich when I get here. Might just give me what I need and has to be better for me than sausages!

[white_hart]

As in "will the toast come out raw, burnt or Just Right?", when nine times out of ten it's raw or burnt.

[jadesfire]

Ah, yes. Ours is more "can i remember which side cooks and which doesn't?"

Why are toasters so rubbish? Our old one was awesome until it blew up :/

[thalia]

Usually 1 egg + the same volume of egg whites scrambled with a bunch of veggies. Sometimes with toast. Today we were out of eggs, so I had cereal with almond milk, which means I'll get hungry around 11.

[jadesfire]

See, eggs are a tricky one for me. I enjoy eating them, but find they make me hungry rather than stopping the hunger. I always put extra protein with them, which helps, but otherwise, they seem to trigger a massive blood sugar drop for me.

Can I ask, what do you do with the yolks you don't eat? I've always wondered about the other half when people use only a yolk or a white!

Interesting how many folks have a non-dairy milk with their breakfast. I feel decidedly less odd for not wanting cow-milk now :)

[thalia]

That's funny--eggs are what fills me up most. Every body's different.

Our grocery stores sell cartons of egg whites, so I don't have to find ways to use extra yolks. Hollandaise sauce and pudding (the US kind; do you have that? The smooth milk-and-egg-based pudding?) take yolks, and there are pasta recipes that call for extra yolks, but, yeah, if I had them they'd mostly just go bad.

[jadesfire]

Huh, that's interesting. I wonder if UK shops sell them too. We don't have Hollandaise pudding, at least not around here, but yes, thinking what I'd do with the leftovers is what puts me off recipes that only use one part of the egg.

[thalia]

Sorry, hollandaise sauce separate from pudding. Here's my favorite chocolate pudding recipe--that's the kind of pudding Americans grow up with. We have bread pudding, but we don't traditionally do anything like your Christmas puddings. (Or sticky toffee pudding--yum! Makes me want to go back to Scotland.)

[jadesfire]

Ah, okay, that makes more sense! I hear 'pudding' on American shows sometimes. We don't really have that sort of thing. Over here, 'pudding' is more of a general term. There's types of pudding, like you said, but if you just say to someone "do you want some pudding?" you mean "do you want dessert?"

We do make cold, set puddings like that, but we'd never call them pudding. Maybe a fool, or a set custard, but not pudding. Suddenly a lot of things make more sense!

[xwingace]

I've never actually made them, but I've seen recipies for salt-cured egg yolks that basically preserve the yolks in salt; they'll keep for much longer and can then be used as flavoring/garnish for other dishes.

Here's one recipe: http://www.epicurious.com/expert-advice/how-to-cure-egg-yolks-recipe-article <-- although that one uses sugar. I'm sure I've seen ones around with salt only, too.

XWA

[jadesfire]

Ooh, intriguing, thanks.

[blackmare]

Well, if eggs don't work, I got nothin' because that's almost the only thing that keeps me from being famished before noon.

In a pinch, a banana with peanut butter will hold me a while. Cereals, while I enjoy them, don't hold up at all. Oatmeal, cold cereals, doesn't matter.

[jadesfire]

Weird, isn't it? Cereals don't do it for me either, and most proteins do, but eggs don't help at all. No matter when I eat them, they *make* me hungry unless I balance them with meat protein.

Peanut butter is coming up a lot. If only I trusted myself with an open jar of the stuff...

[xwingace]

I tend to skip breakfast these days, but if I do eat, it's a bread roll with chocolate sprinkles (I may be giving away which country I'm from with that :D), that same kind of roll with strawberries and some sugar or, even simpler, a banana, possibly augmented later in the morning with some other fruit.

We also have a very bready/cakey gingerbread here, that I love with cream cheese or butter. Also makes for a nice breakfast or snack

Or a slice of very dark rye bread with cream cheese or some other soft cheese (or the abovementioned chocolate sprinkles), but I don't often have that rye bread in the house

[jadesfire]

I'm leaning towards something like a dark rye bread, just for a change and to be more filling. I need to look into what I can get around here - there's lots of choice in Oxford, so I just need to shop around.

Thanks :)

[naye]

Bread! And fruit. I love bread. I love to eat bread in the morning. Unfortunately there's a correlation between my weight gain and how much bread (and jam) I eat in the morning, so I've weaned myself off of it (except as a special weekend treat!). Still: bread~! Not toast. Bread from the bakery, preferably a rye sourdough or something like that. With jam, with marmalade, with apple & pear spread, with honey, with cheese, with pate... that's where it's at for me. I also love brown Norwegian goat's cheese (brunost), but it's a bit too expensive to get here.

Uh. Bread raving aside, what I eat now is a bowl of this super-fancy, all natural muesli with two sliced fruits (pear/banana/apple). I have it with milk, but I also like yogurt and whatnot? (Never tried it with almond/oat/soy milk...)

When I lived in Japan I sometimes had rice and daikon pickles for breakfast! :D

[jadesfire]

Yes, I'm very much the same with bread!

Gosh, that is fancy muesli :) I like Dorset Cereals, so am thinking I might investigate that one. I'm not opposed to trying alternatives, but I think my British brain might struggle with pickles first thing in the morning!

[poisontaster]

I definitely need proteins for breakfast, of the egg, cheese or meat (or, best of all, all three!) variety, both to tolerate the obscene number of pills I take and just for my general mental and stomach well being. Which isn't of much help to you, but many years ago when I was doing Weight Watchers, they were very upfront about how different people respond better to different kinds of breakfast, to get their system going in the morning and to give them the energy to get them through the day, and to kind of balance your ideas around what works for you. It sounds like you're a protein eater also, so experiment with things on that front, things that are not, maybe, traditional breakfast foods.

[jadesfire]

It's nice to know I'm not the only one to wrestle with these things. I'm definitely going to have to come up with a non-traditional solution, I think, but I've certainly got lots of inspiration now!

[pwcorgigirl]

I have cereal with fruit and soy milk (and coffee, of course) or toast spread with peanut butter and sprinkled with raisins. Often I will boil some eggs and take one to work as a mid-morning snack when the cereal wears off. In the winter, I usually have a bowl of oatmeal (porridge) cooked with raisins or some other dried fruit.

We have a traditional eggs & bacon with pastry breakfast only on Christmas Day, mostly because I can't bear anything greasy or sugary first thing in the morning.

You may be one of those people who does better with an unconventional breakfast. One of my friends eats soup for breakfast because she can't stand regular breakfast foods.

[jadesfire]

Huh, I've thought about eggs for midmorning before. While they make me hungry when they're hot, I do prefer cold boiled eggs. Definitely one for the list.

I used to love cooked breakfasts, but can only really manage something like a bacon sandwich most days. And I do like my sweet things - I know folks who do things like soup, and I always struggle with it conceptually!

I'm leaning towards a granola bar with coffee before I leave, to be followed by rye bread/ryvita with ham/sardines/cream cheese when I get to work and see how I get on. Hopefully that will balance out my need for carbs, sugar AND protein!

[pwcorgigirl]

The granola bar and coffee sounds really good as a first breakfast. That would give you the fuel to get to work and then have lots of protein for the second go-round.