After four years of celebrating foods meant to be eaten after the morning is over — pizza, burgers, tacos and ribs — CL’s annual food tournament is finally giving proper due to the meal that kicks off the day. Get ready for the Breakfast Bowl.
It’s the most important meal of the day, if you believe 1950s nutritionists or your mom. But most people give it short shrift at best — protein bar and a Big Gulp for some, instant oatmeal and pasteurized OJ for others. Some skip solid food entirely in favor of the Starbucks drive-through. Caffeine, my friends, is not — technically — food.
Don’t you know that some of your friends get up before dawn to prepare the kinds of breakfasts that can really start the day off right? Eggs — nature’s perfect food — in dozens of different ways, from simple sunny-side up to poached perfection, from hard scramble to fluffy French omelet. Sausage, in crisp-skinned links or grease-slicked patties. Bacon — oh, the bacon.
And let’s not forget that breakfast is the one meal of the day where sweet stuff can be the entree, instead of merely an award for cleaning your plate. A tower of Belgian waffles covered in fresh strawberries and whipped cream isn’t a dessert at 8 a.m.; it’s the main attraction. Stacks of flapjacks topped by a slowly spreading pat of butter and doused in maple syrup, or French toast redolent of cinnamon and nutmeg — it’s all allowed before 10 a.m.
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2011.
