Mental Health Monday: Part of a Complete Breakfast!
Welcome to my online breakfast nook. It’s a brand-new week, everybody! I hope your weekends were relaxing, and I hope everyone is adjusting well. Hopefully the lockdown won’t be for too much longer. I certainly hope everybody is taking good care of themselves in this strange and difficult time. I’m here for you all, you lovely readers.
I spent the weekend learning about CSS, coding, websites and WordPress maintenance. The blog looks a little nicer, don’t you think? If you like what you’re seeing, leave a comment or send an email. There are more improvements coming in the future, so if you’ve been reading along so far, thank you! I hope you stick around. And, if you’re just getting here for the first time, welcome! I hope you stick around. I’ve got lots more recipes to share, hot takes on the industry that I’ve barely started to express and some (hopefully) inspiring words about good cooking and good health.
In my opinion, the concepts of both good cooking and good health are rather similar. I think of them as platforms atop three pillars. The pillars of good cooking are product, equipment and technique. If one of those pillars is weak, the other two have to work harder to compensate. For example, if you have fantastic produce and top-notch equipment but your technique is lousy, you still have to work awfully hard to produce good food. If you have good technique, but your product and equipment aren’t the best, you have to work very hard using that technique to make amazing dishes. But when all three of the pillars are strong, then you get some amazing food.
Your personal health is like that, too. The pillars are physical health, mental health and spiritual health. By spiritual health, I don’t necessarily mean going to synagogue or reading your bibles. To me, spiritual health is an offshoot of mental health. It’s your unconscious happiness. Too deep to get into here and now, and not really what I want to talk about anyways.
What I DO want to talk about today is something cooking-related that I think is super-important for good health, and an easy step to take seeing as most of us are trapped at home now anyways. What am I getting to? Why, making a good breakfast, of course.
So many of us, especially those in the culinary industry have lousy, on-the-go breakfasts of overly sugary coffee and pastry or just skip breakfast altogether. Having breakfast sets the stage of your day. While it really doesn’t matter for weight loss or maintenance (that rumour that breakfast “sets” your metabolism for the day is bollocks), it matters for other reasons.
As a person who works primarily nights, cooking on the line for dinner service, I often used to skip breakfast in favour of getting more sleep. I have to be up late, so getting up early and cooking myself breakfast wasn’t the most attractive option, I thought. But, once I started doing it, I noticed a big change in my demeanor. I didn’t hit the hunger wall before service started. I was less irritable and better able to focus on my work. I had more energy when I needed it. All good things.
Plus, cooking breakfast well is a very attractive quality. Sure, cook a fancy dinner and you can impress a date or two. But, if you get the chance to cook them breakfast, especially if you do it up as breakfast in bed, and you knock that out of the park, then you, my friend, are a keeper. Just ask Liz, I’m pretty sure that’s the only reason she keeps me around.
Having something in your stomach earlier helps to keep you from binging on crap later. It’s a fact. And breakfast at home is soooo easy. Just keep some simple staples on hand, you don’t need much. You got butter? Yeah, of course you do. What about bacon? Get some, thick cut and dry-cured if you can. That shit lasts forever, but it won’t have to ‘cuz it’s so tasty. Eggs? So versatile! Such protein! Bread? It’s quarantine! Everybody is making that shit themselves. Even if you don’t wanna make your own bread, who cares? Everybody loves WonderBread toast.
Equipment? You got a heavy-bottomed cast iron or carbon steel pan? That’s really all you need. You can render your bacon in it, cook your eggs in there once it’s well-seasoned and slippery. Hell, you can even toast your bread in there if you don’t have a toaster or an oven or a hairdryer or whatever.
How much work is that, really? Put on a pot of coffee. Pour a glass of orange juice. Cook some bacon. As the bacon drains on paper towels, cook the eggs right in the bacon fat. Don’t bother with another pan, it’s early for chrissakes. Grab the toast out of the toaster, butter it up and you’re done.
Looks great, right? I made that this morning and it makes all the difference. A couple of slices of my homemade sourdough, which I won’t get into much because if you have Instagram, you’re probably already sick of seeing and hearing about sourdough. A little unsalted butter on the bread. A couple slices of crispy bacon. Two eggs, scrambled and cooked gently in the bacon fat. Just salt and pepper and stir in a little bit of sour cream right at the end for creamy, custard-y and delicious eggs that even Gordon Ramsay would say are “the most amazing, gorgeous scrambled eggs… you donkey.”
Everybody appreciates having breakfast made for them. The more you do it, the better you feel and it so easily becomes a part of your routine. I really hope that if you take anything away from this blog, it’s this: you can’t be your best without a good… break-fest? Ah hell, you know what I mean.
