Breakfast for Dinner
Written By Ann Hodgman
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What you eat is more important than when you eat it.
Recipes:
- Honey-baked french toast
- Sausage and cheese strata
- Jiggly fruit terrine
- The best blueberry muffins
- Puffy pancake
I always want to cry when I hear breakfast called the most important meal of the day. I wish I could read an authority who says, "C'mon, it's not that big a deal." Because in our house, breakfast is the least important meal of the day. Oh, it's important as a time period. Breakfast is that time of day when the dogs need to go out right away or they'll burst, and the hamster is discovered to have escaped again, and the humans fight for the same section of the newspaper and try to find lost homework assignments before missing the school bus. But as a source of intensive nutrition, breakfast here has always ranked lower than microwave popcorn.
It's not just that I don't take the time to set a pretty table and cook my family a wholesome breakfast every morning; it's that I'm not even awake. As soon as both my children were in grade school, my husband (a morning person) and I (an extremely not-morning person) made an arrangement whereby David got up with them every morning and I met them at the bus stop every afternoon. I made supper; David oversaw breakfast, which did not mean cooking it. The kids grabbed a little Cap'n Crunch and then missed the bus.
Both my children grew up healthy and went to college, which supports my theory that a hearty morning meal isn't quite the make-or-break deal people say it is. I prefer to look at it this way: Breakfast is the most delicious meal of the day, but it doesn't matter so much when in the day it comes. Bacon! Muffins! Pancakes! No breakfast food can scare a child unless it's boiled eggs, the most sickening dish ever invented, or kippers, which aren't much of a risk in 21st- century America. So in my house, we have Breakfast for Dinner. At least one night a month, we eat the kind of hearty breakfast you imagine reading about in old Bobbsey Twins books — waffles and bacon, or scrambled eggs with sausages, or French toast with, well, bacon or sausages. The only fight we've ever had over Breakfast for Dinner was, "What's for dessert?" I said that you don't get dessert after breakfast; the kids disagreed. So we compromised. They could rummage around for a cookie if they wanted, but I certainly wasn't going to make dessert on those nights. That would be too indulgent.
