Category: Breakfast

Spring Forward and Wake Up!

Adjusting to the time change? Start the day with a spicy breakfast that will wake up both you…and your taste buds. With a busy week ahead, we need to make sure we are fueled-up and energized to make the most of every opportunity.

On the plate, a healthy and budget-conscious combo – leftover olive, onion and mushroom whole wheat pizza is topped by a poached egg. We sprinkled two salt-free spice blends on top; one lemony and the other with a hint of chipotle. Sliced blood orange add a few extra vitamins and enhance flavour with a citrus note. After a week of “road food”, we’re especially grateful for a taste of home.

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With a salad, this would also be a great dinner time combination for those of you who have given up eating meat for Lent.

Go-for-Gold Breakfast

We’re joining the rest of Canada for a little breakfast time hockey, before we head off to church. The eggs in our golden spicy scramble are combined with a red onion, a habanero pepper, a handful of mushrooms, some diced pancetta, and sage. On the side, molasses-baked kidney beans and some grilled polenta.

If this doesn’t get us going for the day, nothing will!

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A Zippy Start for Your Day

After a week of wild weather, it appears the sun is making an effort to shine. We are definitely planning to take advantage of that. To get ready, a big mug of Full Steam coffee, and a delicious goat cheese-cranberry-lime panini. Here’s how we made it, for two:

Mix 2oz/60g goat cheese, zest and juice of 1/2 lime, 1T/15ml chopped cilantro. Spread on 4 slices whole grain homemade raisin bread. Add 2T/30ml cranberry preserves to each, spread, and assemble sandwiches. Our preserves came from a Nova Scotia business, Terra Beata.

Butter both sides and cook on a panini press, grill, or in the frying pan until golden. Enjoy!

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Poached Egg on…what?!?

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Eat what you have.

In our continuing quest to finish up things in the freezer or cupboard before automatically heading to the grocery store, we try to keep this in mind. This also means judicious use of leftovers. A couple of nights ago we made a delicious pizza – caramelized onions, olives and mushrooms on a wheat crust, topped with just a little shaving of cheese. With lunch appointments yesterday, the extra slices were still in the fridge, and made a perfect base for a soft-poached egg. Truly, it was a gold medal breakfast.

Does This Taste Cheesy to You?

3000 steps and 7 km on the rower before 7am, while watching the medals for our Canadians at Sochi. These cheese-and-egg breakfast sandwiches will get us on our way. Whole wheat burger buns, bought on sale and frozen for later use, get a freshening in the toaster. Slather on a little Dijon and a couple of tomato slices. For each serving, cook two sliced mushrooms and pour a beaten egg on top. Add a light grating of sharp cheddar. It’ll wake up your mouth (and the rest of you) and keep you going til lunchtime.

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Start the Day with an Experiment

One of the most fun things about eating healthily is trying new and unusual fruits and vegetables. Yesterday we were shopping and spotted a granadilla, a semi-tropical, round, orange, shiny fruit. But what to do with it?

We made a use-it-up fruit salad that included a banana, chopped pear, chopped apple, a few walnuts (cleaning up the pantry) and a cup of fat-free plain yogurt. The fruit provided the sweetness. Spooning this mixture into bowls after stirring so the yogurt coated everything, we cut into the mystery fruit and scooped its seedy interior on top. The insides are reminiscent of passion fruit or pomegranate, with crunchy, gel-encased seeds. It makes a berry-ish, crunchy-sweet topping and a delicious way to start the day. Was it worth a buck-ninety-nine? As an everyday addition to the grocery budget, perhaps not, but layering that with the fun factor of discovering a new taste, I’d say it was great value.

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Fuel Up Fast!

Nearly an hour on the rowing machine and a long day’s work ahead calls for some serious energy. My grandmother used to start us off on cold winter days with a bowl of oatmeal, and she was right. But we don’t need instant oats or the long, slow cooking of her day. Large flake, old fashioned (or steel-cut) oats will cook nicely in the microwave in under 10 minutes.

We dressed ours up with some extra protein (walnuts), dried cranberries and cinnamon, and topped it with half a banana. And we’re off to race through another day!

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La Chandeleur is Crêpe Day!

Sure, we know that most Canadians may associate February 2nd with Groundhog Day…but it is also La Chandeleur, or Candlemas, commemorating the presentation of Jesus at the Temple. As with most celebrations, this fourth Joyful Mystery of the rosary has its own special food traditions. In France it is “Crêpe Day”, something we also try to carry on here in our house.

Lots of sweet or savory accompaniments are possible, lemon and chocolate among them, but for today we chose peaches, cinnamon, and yogurt sweetened with maple syrup.

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However you like them, enjoy some crêpes today. And lest you think we have completely pushed Groundhog Day from our minds, “ground hog” will feature prominently in the meatballs we’re planning for dinner.

Everything's Coming Up…Peaches?

Brrrr! We started the day with the last vestiges of a 3-hour power outage, some of which happened while we were blissfully asleep. By 6ish NS Power had things up and running again. It was interesting that we were the only “powerless” area in the province! We always knew we were special.

Heading outside, we finished clearing the driveway by starlight, then headed in just as the sun was coming up from behind the hills on the other side of the Bay. The sky was a brilliant peach, which got us thinking…what better way to warm up than oatmeal with peaches that we froze at the height of freshness, last summer? Something to be grateful for, we say!

No photo? Apparently it was too good to waste time doing that!

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Use it Up!

January has been a month of creativity for us – in food, and how we live. We decided at the beginning of the month to follow the old advice: use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. I must admit we haven’t felt as though we are doing without, but instead, finding things in our cupboards, closets, drawers and refrigerators and turning them to a more interesting purpose. The delicious horseradish mustard that we use frequently in summer made a tangy start to this egg-wich, which also amps up its veg quotient with minced broccoli ends and a few straggler mushrooms that were left in the bag.

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We are working our way through the summer’s harvest, our forgotten condiments, and frozen remains of big batch cooking from the fall. And it’s been a delicious journey…one we will continue for as long as possible.