A Story about Breakfast

While it would be great to have an elaborate dish for every meal, for practical reasons one of them needs to be simpler. Since I eat full meals at lunchtime and in the evening, breakfast is the one that gets simplified. This got me thinking: what is a good weekday breakfast for me?

While bread plus toppings is probably the most common German one, a good loaf of bread has a shelf life of a day, before the quality drops significantly at room temperature. There are three options to work with this: buy/bake bread every day, freeze it and toast it in the morning, buy bread that is designed to keep for long. The first one is infeasible, similar the second one, as my freezer space is severely limited. While the third is an option, the quality that you get is not that great.

With bread no longer in the picture, what are the criteria to choose something? In the end I landed on:

• Quick: it shouldn't take much time than to make tea or coffee (<5 minutes).
• Simple: use as few dishes as possible, make it that its possible to execute half a sleep.
• Filling: my lunch is usually 5-6 hours after breakfast.
• Cheap: keeping the breakfast cost low, allows me to spend more of the monthly food budget on the meals.

For me, it doesn't need to be typical breakfast food. I will happily eat something tasty at any time of the day. Though I generally prefer warm over cold and savoury over sweet. With this in mind, the search began. Looking at the filling and cheap ingredients we have here, you have wheat-based items (flour, oats, pasta and, to some extent also bread), potatoes, rice and lentils. Apart from oats and bread, they all need to be cooked or, in the case of flour, transformed into something else. So let's have a look at oats. They can be soaked overnight and added to yoghurt or milk for muesli, or cooked into porridge. I ended up making the latter again for breakfast, using the microwave. It fulfils the main criteria. Making porridge is quick, under 3 minutes, and uses a bowl and a spoon. Further, mixing oats and liquid of choice (mine is milk), in rough 1:2 (oats:liquid) ratio and putting it into the microwave, can be done nearly fully asleep. On its own, it's a blank canvas. I usually add jam or fruit. This reduces the cost to under €17, not including most the fruit. While not savoury, it's a decent breakfast.

Maybe in the future I will explore savoury porridge, borrowing concepts from different cuisines, or try making a something completely different. Any idea to make fast breakfast potatoes? On another note, we don't have a street food culture here. While you can buy breakfast items from a bakery, they are generally not great and relatively expensive. What do you eat for breakfast?