Breakfast: the most important meal of the day
Many educators, dietitians, and nutritionists proclaim that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It keeps you from crazy snaking later in the day due to low blood sugar, and it energizes the mind to keep you focused. But who really has time to make breakfast every morning? You already wake up at 5 or 6 am in order to get your household up and running for the day: packing lunches, waking your husband for the 5th time to tell him he better get out of bed because his carpool is waiting outside, making sure the kids are really up and didn’t just hit the snooze on their alarm, making sure everyone is dressed appropriately for the weather, and on and on…
So, what do you do? Wake up an extra half hour (making yourself even more sleep deprived)? Feed your family sugar-loaded, processed, empty-caloric on-the-go breakfasts? Maybe… but there is a better way.
What I try to do is stock my freezer and fridge of breakfasts foods, already cooked, and just need to be reheated. As I am typing right now, I am preparing 3 different kinds of waffles: blueberry, apple cinnamon, and plain. I tend to add a few tablespoons of wheat bran and wheat germ to the mixture to give it an extra healthy boost. I freeze these than reheat them in the toaster oven, so they’re crispy. You can also microwave or use the oven. I’m also planning an baking up some banana nut muffins and trying for the first time to make cheese danishes (unhealthy but DH loves them). I like to make my baked goods from scratch because I can control the amount of fat and sugar in them and use substitutes (like apple sauce as a sweetener, or whole wheat flour rather than white) if I’d like.
As for the protein part of the meal, eggs cook very fast: scrambled, over easy, sunny side up, doesn’t take more than a couple minutes. You can always microwave some bacon, too, if you don’t have time to pan fry (bacon is healthier than sausage, because when you cook bacon most of the fat is removed). I also always keep plenty of fruit on hand.
If you’re really spent on time, you can always make sure to keep some fat-free vanilla yogurt in the fridge and frozen fruits to whip up a breakfast smoothie to go with your muffin that you made earlier and take to eat in the car (your coffee thermos has more than one use!).
There you go, plan and make ahead, and have one less worry.
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
