Waking Up To Breakfast

About author / Sarah Christine Bolton

Coffee addict; professional food writer; food fusion. Her slow cooker recipes go above and beyond your normal crockpot fare.

Ah, Breakfast, you beautiful beacon of sustenance and motivation. I am personally a huge fan of breakfast. I’m hungry almost as soon as I wake up and if I don’t get breakfast (and that doesn’t happen very often), I am a cranky, scary person until I get sustenance.

Breakfast is one of the most forgotten meals, especially to Americans, but also is one of the most important. According to all sorts of official studies, people who eat breakfast are often more slender, perhaps because breakfast kick-starts their metabolism early in the day, helping to burn more calories. Breakfast eaters are supposedly more productive and alert during school and work.

The word breakfast originated as a verb in 1679. It comes from the concept that sleep prevents eating, therefore eating a meal when you first wake up “breaks” your “fast.” For those of us who eat late and heavily, it’s not much of a fast. If you are waking up feeling bloated, still full, and nauseous, then you probably ate too much the night before.

For many of us, breakfast is a time-luxury that we can’t afford in the morning. Then, if you get really busy during the day, it might be easy to just skip lunch. The problem is that by the time most of America gets home every night, hunger is a roaring beast that is usually only fed by vast amounts of food. You wake up the next morning, unable to eat anything more than a cup a coffee. And the cycle continues.

To me, breakfast is a magical time, a sort of gentle awakening to the world. Breakfast is one of the most romantic meals of the day. If you don’t agree with me, go watch “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” with Audrey Hepburn. The opening scene is beautiful, and will make you love breakfast forever. The rest of the movie is okay…but they don’t ever eat breakfast again.

When I was a child growing up in Montana, we would take annual trips to California to visit my mom’s parents. My Nana and Pompa lived in a big house high above the San Francisco bay. I would wake up every morning to the smell of coffee wafting through the heater vents. As I staggered downstairs, I could hear Pompa watching “Kathy Lee and Regis Live!” in the other room. Nana would make me oatmeal with sweet chunks of peaches and bananas.

An old German proverb goes something like this: “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper,” which translated basically means: don’t eat like a pig at 10:00 at night. No, I never took German in school. It just comes naturally to me.

Unlike lunch and dinner foods, which are somewhat interchangeable, breakfast foods in Western civilization are very distinctive. Eggs, bagels, pancakes, hashbrowns, etc. are considered exclusively breakfast items. They can be served for dinner or lunch, but then they are labeled “brunch,” or breakfast for dinner. Unless, of course, you head over to the International House of Pancakes or Waffle House, where you can eat breakfast pretty much anytime you so desire.

Throughout the world, people drink fairly similar beverages for breakfast, including fruit juices, milk, and hot caffeinated or non-caffeinated drinks. Some people actually drink carbonated soda (a.k.a. Coke) during breakfast. Those people should be sent to a remote island…with plenty of soda, of course. One of my personal favorite breakfast beverages is the Mimosa cocktail: champagne and orange juice. I mean, talk about a brilliant invention. You get your Vitamin C and you start the day off on such a great note.

Try making this recipe before you go to bed, and when you wake up, breakfast will be greeting you. It’s hard to turn down a friendly meal that calls out your name when you stagger into the kitchen. At least that’s my theory. We will have to wait for those official studies to come out before conclusive results can be published.

Serves/Makes: 8

• non-stick cooking spray
• 2 cups rolled oats
• 8 cups water
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup cubed peaches