Six healthy and delicious breakfasts to start eating now
Mr Science and I have perfected the art of menu planning. We plan our dinners two weeks in advance and get all the necessary ingredients for our meals. We choose meals in which some ingredients can be used again, and we always mix it up to include some meals with meat and others that are vegan or vegetarian.
What we haven’t been very good at, however, is planning our breakfasts. For the longest time I would have a grapefruit or some toasted homemade whole wheat bread with homemade peanut butter and raw honey, and Mr Science would make himself a breakfast sandwich using our homemade bread plus a free-range egg, nitrate-free bacon, and a processed cheese slice.
Although these aren’t necessarily unhealthy meals, they certainly don’t provide much variety in nutrients. Moreover, grapefruit doesn’t provide a whole lot of energy to start the day, bread isn’t the best thing to have on a super regular basis, and processed cheese slices really shouldn’t be a breakfast staple.
So, keeping all of that in mind, we decided to put a little more effort into planning our breakfasts along with our dinners. We are making much more of an effort to change the types of things we eat for breakfast every day or every few days so as to get a variety of different nutrients. And we have made some great discoveries in the types of breakfasts that we enjoy!
Here are six of our favourite healthy and delicious breakfasts:
1) Oatmeal. We use organic oats from a local company and cook them on the stove with some local raw honey and organic cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger (and we like to add some skim milk powder to the water).
2) Smoothies. Okay, this one is mostly me – I’ve always enjoyed my green smoothies! Since getting the U-RAAW! custom-made smoothie mix, I’ve been using that with milk, fruit, and my homemade powdered dark leafy greens. It is so delicious.
Drinking a tasty spirulina / milk / banana / blueberry smoothie for breakfast!
3) Cereal. Mr Science and I had a bit of an obsession with unhealthy cereals for a while (*cough* Cap’n Crunch *cough*), but we have recently discovered a cereal that is even more delicious than Cap’n Crunch! I know; I was surprised too. Our new favourite is Nature’s Path Crunchy Vanilla cereal. It’s delicious and it has some wholesome goodness to it, too.
4) Free-range scrambled eggs, nitrate-free bacon, and homemade hashbrowns. We usually have this meal on Sunday mornings. It takes a long time for the potatoes to boil and then be turned into hashbrowns, but it is worth the wait! This is a great treat, and it is made healthier by using free-range eggs, nitrate-free bacon, and organic potatoes (as well as the fact that we only enjoy it once each week).
5) Fruit salad or blueberry spelt pancakes. Now that fruit is coming into season, we’ve started getting a variety of different fruits to make fruit salad (including apples, bananas, grapes, strawberries, and oranges). In the winter time, a nice replacement would be pancakes made with spelt flour instead of white flour, plus plenty of frozen blueberries added to the mix. Yum!
6) Organic fruit or whole wheat bread with homemade peanut butter. Although homemade peanut butter (made just by processing peanuts until they’re smooth) tastes odd the first few times you eat it, over time you will like it so much better than conventional peanut butter (which has all kinds of junk in it). Spread your homemade peanut butter over banana or apple slices, or occasionally over some homemade whole wheat or multigrain bread (or a sprouted grain wrap).
I never did like sweet things in my oatmeal. I liked oatmeal in cookies, but in a bowl I want nothing but a little salt. In recent years I seem to be allergic to it again, though. It doesn’t taste good any more, and my mouth and my stomach are not happy.
My most frequent breakfast is cheese toast, the sharper the cheese the better. My second most frequent is broccoli quiche (crustless because I’m lazy, not because I’m trying to avoid grains.) Always followed by strawberries topped with ice cream.
If you want to speed up the hash browns you could boil the potatoes ahead of time. Or make potato pancakes, where you grate the potatoes raw before mixing in the egg and onion.
I never developed a taste for box cereals. My parents didn’t like it (they were eggs, bacon, and toast people before our allergy diagnosis when I was six) so I seldom ate it, and when I did I wondered why people liked it. I don’t much like smoothies, either. I’d usually rather eat the ingredients in their original form. The exception to that is gazpacho, which I occasionally have for breakfast in the summer.
Mary Anne in Kentucky
Mmmm cheese toast and broccoli quiche! Both of those sound delightful.