Weekend Mornings

To some, making breakfast wouldn't be such a big deal. However, I have only recently become a breakfast eater, so cooking in the morning is a huge change for me!

My boyfriend and I are creatures of habit. We go through periods of time when we like to eat the same things. Over and over. Therefore, I am currently working on perfecting a simply, yet delicious breakfast meal. I'm talking ve-e-e-ery simple. For the past few weeks, I have been focusing on bacon, eggs, and toast. Sounds simple -- and it is -- yet I have really worked to try to make it as good as it can be.

As silly as it sounds (yes, I know there are people out there who cook breakfast every single day and made a science out of it years ago), this can sometimes be challenging. We've eaten soft chewy (yuck!) bacon, rather than crispy... Scrambled eggs have also been a challenge. Since neither of us has previously been a big egg eater (you know, except for the bits in fried rice or the ones that are in brownie batter), we had to find a way to cook eggs that we really liked. Enough to want to eat. Scrambled seems to be the only way thus far. Maybe one day we'll branch out, but not so far...

On my first day adding cheese to the eggs, my boyfriend declined to eat them. When he did add some to his plate a few days later, he said, "Now I'm mad that I didn't eat them the other day!" Well, yeah. I could have told him adding cheese was not going to make them taste bad...

So what we've really come down to is this: a list of likes & dislikes. For example, we like thick-cut hardwood smoked bacon -- brand really isn't an issue. You can eyeball a cut of bacon in the grocery store and usually find one that tastes good based on color and ratio of meat to fat. Not such a huge fan of the thin-sliced bacon. We wouldn't turn it down, though. Just seems pointless to cook it when bacon takes a while. With thin-sliced pieces, bacon disappears around my house like it's made of smoke. The thick-sliced bacon seems to last a bit longer, as it has some more meat to it.

For eggs, we want them scrambled with cheese, salt, and lots of pepper. I have used just mozzarella, but a shredded cheese mix works well (like a mix with two or more of mozzarella, cheddar, colby, monterrey jack, asiago, or parmesan). I cook mine until they've just lost their wet look; my boyfriend likes his cooked until there is a little bit of browning on the bottom of some of the egg nibbles.

Toast we haven't done that much with. What exactly is there to do? I toast some wheat slices and spread whipped butter on top while they're hot. I usually spread some fruit preserves on one of my slices. I like the sweet fruit as a foil to the smoky bacon.

Yum. Maybe we'll have breakfast for dinner tonight...