As someone who doesn’t much adhere to the habit of a conventional breakfast (by which I mean eating a meal first thing in the morning), I do love breakfast foods. I see no reason why something as good as a perfectly cooked omelette should be relegated to the wee hours of the morning only. The French seem to have this right—bistro menus often feature an omelette (fluffy and yellow, rolled into a fat cylinder, without a speck of browning on the surface) oozing Gruyere cheese, dotted with fines herbes, and accompanied by a tangle of lightly dressed greens and a glass of white wine.
This brings me to another aspect of the breakfast genre that thrills me: traveling and breakfast. Even now, but especially when I was little, one of the things I always paid gleeful attention to was the customary breakfast in different places.
(SIDEBAR: ooooh, helloooo remember traveling? The click-click of an airplane seat belt and the oh-so-brief adrenaline jolt when you rush to put your shoes back on before your bags pile up on the TSA scanner and the blandly familiar geometric pattern of every airport carpet and tiny whoosh in your stomach just as the plane’s wheels leave the ground and the wings catch the air?)
On a trip to France many years ago—before we’d set out for the day with hiking poles and a loosely planned itinerary to climb rolling hills to an abandoned chapel or to walk for miles through dusty countryside roads that cut through sunflower fields—we’d eat a quick breakfast at whatever tiny hotel we were staying, in whatever tiny rural town we found ourselves. We’d spread seedy raspberry jam over deeply browned croissants that showered buttery flakes across our plates with each bite. There would be slices of baguette with dishes of orange marmalade and softened butter. Glasses of orange juice and an assortment of cookies. (Cookies! For breakfast! My twelve-year-old self was bowled over and very deeply impressed with this approach: Why eat something like…god forbid…Shredded Wheat when you could eat a cookie?) Unlike the cookies I was used to, these were packaged in crackly cellophane sleeves and teetered on the edge between cracker and cookie, like a Melba toast and an oatmeal cookie had a tiny chic French baby.
In France: no cheese, no eggs, no bacon.
I prefer savory to sweet first thing in the morning—with the notable exception of fruit. But when presented on that same trip with miniature foil-sealed packets of Nutella alongside the bread basket in the airy, light-filled conservatory breakfast hall of a hotel in the Swiss Alps, I most certainly did stash as many as possible in my pockets for later. Insurance, you see. You never know when an absolutely desperate desire for a mouthful of creamy hazelnut-infused chocolate might strike.
Granted, traveling often means hotel food which is decidedly not reflective of actual local customs most of the time. Stay in a Four Seasons anywhere in the world and you’ll have your pick of scrambled eggs, puffy Belgian-style waffles, cold cereal, fruit with yogurt, oatmeal with a slew of toppings, and a platter of pastries from muffins to jam-swirled danishes.
Of course, this tends to be the case mostly at big hotels or international chains, but I find it particularly amusing when the breakfast offerings include all of the above, plus a cursory nod—tucked to the side next to the omelette station—to wherever in the world you happen to be: say, sticky congee topped with a drizzle of sesame oil in Shanghai, or savory tamales wrapped in banana leaves in Mexican City, or mieliepap (creamy corn porridge) in Johannesburg.
But if you care to adventure out and about for your first meal of the day, you easily uncover the everyday customs around you.
In Charleston, you eat a platter of corn grits so smooth and luscious that you swear they must have a 50/50 corn-to-heavy cream ratio. They’re heaped high with a pile of spiced shrimp, tangled up with bits of crispy bacon and andouille sausage. The next day you turn down a different street to a different cafe and you order two oversized biscuits—so light and fluffy that the pillowy inside disintegrates the second you take a bite—smothered in a thick gravy.
You fly to Santa Barbara for a wedding one weekend. The day after—your head slightly foggy from three mint-and-gin cocktails—you take a run along the ocean, breathing in the salty air and the smell of the bougainvillea that dots the stuccoed walls of the pretty beachfront houses. After a shower you sit outside at a small cafe on a sunny, brick-lined street and eat a quinoa bowl with poached eggs and avocado, the requisite green juice alongside it, spiked with lemon and pineapple.
Late May on Lake Como. You eat breakfast at a table perched high on a hill overlooking the lake, the expanse of water spread out beneath you, the shoreline dotted with towns—the small clusters of buildings in once vibrant candy colors that have gotten faded and sunbleached over time into delicate pastels. You sip a cappuccino so strong and dark that it makes all other coffee seem like a pale, distant memory. A raft of stiff foamed milk swims on top. Breakfast here is a cornetto: a cross between a brioche and a croissant. It’s shaped like a croissant, but the dough has eggs, so it’s more pliable and less flaky.
South Africa—spring of 2008. You’re studying at the University of Cape Town, which is situated just on the edge of Table Mountain atop a very steep hill. At the base of the hill is the sprawling suburb of Rondebosch: a bustling, noisy, vibrant hub of cafes and residential streets. The main road runs like an artery through the heart of it all, packed on weekday mornings with minibuses that lurch to a sudden stop every now and then to pick up and drop off passengers, their honking horns filling the hot, sunny air with a cheerful cacophony. To get to class, you have to walk 20 minutes up the hill, your sandals thwacking and your book bag heavy with textbooks on Southern African energy crises and environment engineering. In one hand, an iced coffee frappe sweats in its plastic cup. You don’t have time to sit down to eat before class so you swing through the kiosk outside the library and pick up two rusks: the barely sweet, intensely crunchy biscotti-like snacks that South Africans eat everywhere. Though not suited for school days, the best coffee they serve in Cape Town is laced with amarula: a Bailey’s-like cream liqueur made from the fruit of the marula tree.
On your honeymoon in the Seychelles, the heat of the day never fully ebbs away—the nighttime air still throbs with humidity, so warm and thick that it swirls around you like it’s alive and breathing. You walk down to breakfast in the early morning while there’s still some shade. You sit at a table overlooking the scalloped curve of a white sand beach and you eat a platter of tropical fruit: sliced mango, guava, passion fruit so pulpy and seductive-looking you feel like you should furtively eat it with your spoon (also because the flavor is so unlike any other fruit that you almost want to groan with the pleasure of it).
I’ve never traveled to Asia (!!) but in New York City you can have it all: You can wander into Chinatown to join the long lines outside the dim sum houses, waiting until your number is called and you’re ushered into a high-ceiled hall packed with throngs of diners eating pork spareribs in black bean sauce and chewy har gow: their translucent edges pleated neatly to hide the savory shrimp and vegetables tucked inside. You can take the subway out to Greenpoint to sit in a one-room, 12-seat Japanese restaurant and order the set breakfast: a small square of perfectly roasted fish, a tiny cube of fluffy omelette, a tidy pile of vegetables, a scoop of seven-grain rice, and miso soup.
But here, at home, breakfast is just as nice eaten in this quiet little white-washed house, creaky floorboards and all, on what feels sometimes like the edge of the world—and I’m happily experimenting with ways to inject a little variety into familiar and simple recipes. Waffles. Pancakes. Eggs.
I add cheddar and smoked paprika to our scrambled eggs. I make two-ingredient pancakes most days (one banana + one egg), and then play around with the base formula, adding pureed raspberries and ricotta, or cardamom and cornmeal, or almond butter and sweet potato.
Waffles are good any time of day—and stand up particularly well to freezing—so I throw all manner of things at the recipe to see what it can handle.
Lately, my favorite versions are GREEN: the following are two I’ve been making often, one skews a little savory and one a little sweet, although neither is too far on either end of the spectrum. I don’t add any sugar to mine, but I’ve put that as optional if you prefer something a little sweeter.
GREEN WAFFLES TWO WAYS!
Spinach Ginger Coconut Waffles
120g (1 cup) all-purpose flour
85g (3/4 cup) whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons sugar, optional
1 teaspoon ground ginger
3 cups baby spinach
227g (1 cup) coconut milk
56g (1/4 cup) coconut oil, melted
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1/4 cup diced candied ginger, optional
Whisk together the flours, baking powder, salt, sugar (if using), and ginger.
Steam or quickly sauté the spinach. Add it to a blender with the coconut milk and puree until smooth.
Whisk the spinach mixture with the coconut oil and eggs.
Stir the wet ingredients into the dry, adding the candied ginger if using.
Cook the batter in a preheated waffle maker.
Arugula Sesame Waffles
120g (1 cup) all-purpose flour
85g (3/4 cup) whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
71g (1/2 cup) sesame seeds
3 cups arugula
227g (1 cup) whole milk
56g (1/4 cup) butter, melted
2 eggs, lightly beaten
Whisk together the flours, baking powder, salt, and sesame seeds.
Steam or quickly sauté the arugula. Add it to a blender with the milk and puree until smooth.
Whisk the arugula mixture with the butter and eggs.
Stir the wet ingredients into the dry.
Cook the batter in a preheated waffle maker.