Ideal Breakfast?

I doubt mine is anybody's ideal, but it works for me.

Frills has a blog post called Porridge and tea where she describes her ideal breakfast and asks readers, How about you? What do you have for breakfast? What does breakfast mean to you?

My breakfast is mainly utilitarian. I eat, even if I’m not hungry when I wake up, because I can be hungry and not think straight despite not feeling hungry. This is not a good thing when you think for a living, and being noticably hangry during the morning stand-up is never a good idea.

That’s what I get for living mainly inside my own head. I must perforce remember, to quote the mantra Hagbard Celine gave George Dorn (and attributed to Timothy Leary) in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, that I am the robot: that my body is not separate from my psyche, and that Cartesian dualism is most likely arrant bullshit.

Like Frills, I tend to breakfast on tea and oats despite being an American. American or not, much of my ancestry is British (English and Irish rather than Welsh) so it still suits. Of course, being an American I’ll be using US/imperial units and providing metric in parentheses.

Oats for Breakfast

Since I have an Instant Pot and a bunch of 8oz (220g) deli cups, I like to prep my oats ahead of time. 1 cup (160g) of steel-cut oats with 2 cups (473ml) yields 4 portions, which I refrigerate overnight.

Since I like my oats savory rather than sweet, I tend to add salt, pepper, and either Jamaican curry powder or Madras curry powder (depending on what’s available) to my oats and water in the cooker. I don’t eat the oats by themselves, but topped with a bit of cheddar cheese. Time permitting, I add an egg and some sausage or bacon for a more satisfying meal.

And sometimes, when I crave pain but don’t have time to play Elden Ring, I add some hot sauce on top of my oats and eggs. (You need not have grown up Catholic to be a masochist, but it helps.)

I get my steel-cut oats for about $3 for a 40oz container at Aldi, and I get at least 3 weeks worth of portions per container, so this is cheaper than putting my eggs and meat into a sandwich.

Incidentally, steel-cut oats prepped with a pressure cooker are also a good filling for meatloaf and other savories, like my wife’s Aussie-style sausage rolls and meat pies. (I still love her pie.)

Cold-brew Breakfast Tea

Hot tea in the morning makes me purry and sleepy despite the caffeine, so a UK-style “cuppa” doesn’t work for me. After drinking one I’d just want to get back into bed and curl up with my wife, cats, and a book.

Instead, I had taken to putting a couple of tea bags and some honey into a 24oz (709ml) bottle and letting the tea brew in my fridge overnight. In the last couple of years, however, I have been cold-brewing powdered Japanese green tea (matcha). Mainly because I can get six months’ worth for twenty bucks at Costco. Here’s my recipe, such as it is.

I drink cold-brewed tea prepared in this manner because it gives me a reasonable amount of caffeine in the morning. I never developed a taste for coffee; no matter how it’s prepared it’s still too bitter for my liking.

Without coffee or the ability to legally purchase amphetamines or cocaine over the counter, I figure that tea is a less unhealthy way to get my caffeine fix than drinking a can of Mountain Dew or Monster Energy every morning. It’s cheaper, too, and not oversaturated with sugar.