New Breakfast Players

 

Also, no nutritional value. 

I had the coolest nurse-midwife in Missoula. When I learned that she had retired from doing deliveries, I was so bummed. I knew women who found her direct approach to be a little harsh, but I (being prone to bluntness myself) appreciated her no-nonsense attitude toward pregnancy and birth.

One of the things she stressed as important in pregnancy (really for everyone) is eating a quality breakfast. I have always been an eater of breakfast, usually hungry soon after I wake up (unlike my brother and father who eat like boa constrictors, seemingly going for days before they're hungry again), but until recently I was also a dedicated cereal and milk girl. Mostly because (cringe), I don't like eggs.  And growing up, no one in my family made anything for breakfast except the occasional egg.  Otherwise, cereal it was!

But this midwife. She gave me endless grief about eating cereal for breakfast.  No protein! Refined sugar! Leaves you hungry by 10 AM! And she was right. I finally called it quits after seeing how quickly the MM and I could go through a box and realizing that we were spending insane amounts of money on expensive, organic cereal that had the same issues as the conventional brands: refined sugar, no protein, heavily processed.

Once Ford started eating real food, we were that much more motivated and have developed a breakfast rotation of: peanut butter toast, 5-grain oatmeal, eggs (for Ford and the MM), French toast, greek yogurt with honey, bananas, and granola, and these amazing oatmeal pancakes from a local Amish farm for Saturday mornings. And always fruit of some sort. It's a good list, but we're getting a little burnt out on it too.

I wish I liked eggy breakfast food.  I really do. I'm sure I'd make it to early afternoon on breakfast if I ate a breakfast burrito with eggs, black beans and avocado. But I. just. can't. Yuck.  So here are two non-egg, but still healthier-than-cereal additions to our line-up:

 

Blueberry, oatmeal and flaxseed muffins from Food52.  I'm going to experiment with reducing the brown sugar by half and seeing if something like applesauce works just as well. 

Lemon Blueberry Quinoa Porridge from Southern Living (no joke!).  We tried this last week and the combination of almonds, lemon and blueberries was almost like eating a lemon poppy seed muffin, only this was good for us! Since we don't keep almond milk on hand, I used regular cows milk and it was fine. I also used frozen blueberries since eating blueberries in January means they're shipped in from Chile: both punishing and expensive.

I'll keep trying to convince my taste buds to like eggs, but no one has come up with a recipe that doesn't...smell like eggs.  With enough extras, these breakfast omelette muffins might be the ticket. 

Also, toddlers apparently love anything shaped like a muffin. Bluffin' with my muffin? I'll cut myself off there. 

Bon Appetit!