eat carolina food challenge day six

This post is part of the week long Eat Carolina Food Challenge where participants are asked to submit a blog post every day of the challenge. Posts from all the other participants are aggregated on the Carolina Farm Stewardship website.

I try and eat a pretty good breakfast during the work week, but the meal is often scattered over the course of a few hours. It isn’t until Sunday that I get to have a good sit down breakfast at a most unreasonable hour of the day (breakfast at noon?). Tomorrow I am looking forward to a big pile of pancakes, a pile of bacon, a pile of scrambled eggs with sweet peppers and goat cheese, a pile of blueberries, a pile of melon, a pile of toast and jam and butter, a pile or rice and honey — just huge piles of breakfasty stuff inches from my coffee rinsed eyes.

I didn’t always have a good relationship with breakfast. During most of my working life (read: most of my life) I have skipped breakfast entirely, preferring to start the day with a billion ounces of various caffeine shots. When I was an apple inspector for the USDA my breakfast was a Jolt cola and a half dozen cigarettes. When I packed trucks in a shoe factory, my breakfast was the yammering on of the forklift driver and a gallon of coffee. When I…well, you get the point.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I really started to get into breakfast as the basis for the day. I would start making rice in the morning and pairing it with various preserves or pour a big bowl of crunchy granola and top it with berries. Or fry up some eggs and potatoes and have at it.

On occasion breakfast became some sort of calming mechanism. Afterwards I’d listen to local morning radio or read a farming magazine or pet the cats. Then on to work in a relaxed state of mind.

Breakfast changed my life so much that I kind of like to eat it for dinner sometimes as well. “Breakfast for Dinner” is a pretty well used phrase around here, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. So yeah, I’m looking forward to breakfast tomorrow…