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What’s Your Greatest Breakfast Ever?
I’m tapped out on the heavy stuff, so here is something lighter…
Is your favorite meal of the day breakfast? If so, this post is for you.
What is your greatest breakfast ever?
For me, it was when I was working in England in the late 1990s. We were working at night, writing software for a currency sorting machine that was being prepared for shipping during the day. The pressure was on, but that was part of the thrill.
We would get up at 3:00 in the afternoon and head to the local pub for breakfast. Fried eggs, sausage, mushrooms, toast, baked beans, fried tomatoes, and a pint of beer. Yeah, that’s right, beer for breakfast. It was paradise. I went from weighing in the 180s to over 200 lbs for the first time in my life and loved every minute of it.
What is your greatest breakfast ever?
Published in General
I’m not sure, but it definitely involves both potatoes and onions.
What? Breakfast in England, without Spam?
c’mon, man!
But in the US I think it’s hard to beat the Ultimate Breakfast at Village Inn.
At least so far, I haven’t found anything that does.
Three pancakes, sausage, bacon, ham slice, eggs, and hash browns.
Christmas morning – breakfast casserole, fresh fruit, mini quiches, candy cane cherry/cream cheese pastry, pigs in a blanket, cream puffs, mulled cider, mimosas, and fruit punch (with sherbet and ginger ale).
Always the best breakfast.
An English breakfast is hard to beat.
That looks pretty good! Although I’d substitute a chocolate milk for the coffee. Never been a coffee drinker.
Who would have thought that mushrooms, fried tomatoes and baked beans are killer at breakfast?
When I was a ‘ute, I would help my best friend deliver the Sunday morning paper. At the completion of our appointed rounds we would retire to the “Chuck Hut” for what the menu listed as the Special Breakfast: two eggs, toast, bacon and hash browns for $.65. Bottomless coffee was extra. And there we would sit. Enjoying a special breakfast, each other’s company and a few Marlboros.
I miss those meals.
One of my favorite memories and breakfast was freshly caught trout pan fried on a portable stove in Yosemite… simple and divine.
I don’t get coffee either, that’s not MY breakfast. I don’t think I could handle chocolate milk for breakfast, though. I usually get milk and orange juice.
My second choice is the Breakfast Sampler at IHOP. It was my go-to before finding the Ultimate Breakfast. Basically the Sampler is the same, except for I think just 2 pancakes, and 2 smaller pieces of ham rather than the full slice.
Man, wtf is going on with Ricochet formatting lately?
Hotel breakfasts in the USSR in the Eighties. Pancakes Russian style, oatmeal, three choices of fish, hardboiled eggs, yogurt, pickles, sausage, stewed tomatoes, incredibly strong coffee, sweet tea, or vodka shots. You left the breakfast room ready to face the day, or fall face down in the snow, or both. Needless to say, the average Russian citizen didn’t have that range of breakfast options. By common agreement of the people I knew there, coffee, yogurt, and yes, vodka were well known staples of the morning meal. Very little citrus juice, though; the Soviet Union didn’t have many territories warm enough, and imports were expensive, so juice glasses were tiny.
that’s awesome! Vodka shots have got to be the foundation of any productive day.
This reminds of the time, back in 1990, when we were living on the second floor of a house owned by two elderly Lithuanian sisters. On Easter morning, I went down the stairs to go to Easter Mass, and the sisters spotted me and dragged me into their apartment for their own Easter celebrations, which involved shots of some unidentified Lithuanian liquor. Life lesson: Do not attempt to outdrink elderly Lithuanian immigrants. Eventually I extracted myself and staggered my way to Mass.
Seems as if it would have to be the one that I cook almost every day:
2 eggs over with slices of bacon, 2 or 3, sausage, grits, toast with butter and raspberry jam and orange juice. This is after I have my coffee.
Yeah, breakfast is my favorite meal.
I’m not a fish eater, but I appreciate the purity of this.
I’ve had lot’s of good breakfasts. I thank God for all the good breakfasts I’ve had. But strictly speaking, does that mean a meal in the morning? Because in my youth, sometimes breaking fast occurred in the afternoon…
Mainly, I like them ‘Smattered, Covered, and Smothered’
There was this one time when I was about 17, when we were hiking in the Yucatan of Guatemala, and we were served a breakfast of fertilized eggs and the most delicious home grown coffee ever. Ok, yeah, that was the best breakfast I’ve ever had. I can still smell the aroma of that coffee.
But still… hard to beat ‘Smattered, Covered, and Smothered’
Breakfast doesn’t have to be in the morning. The greatest breakfasts I recount in the OP were in late afternoon.
A great breakfast isn’t just about the food. It’s about the context, the location, the friends, the memories. This sounds a lot like my greatest breakfasts, even if the details are entirely different. It’s about the meal meeting the moment.
Funny. I was telling a friend just a couple of days ago about the wonders of the full English breakfast. And I’d have given that as my answer, until I was reminded of huevos rancheros by Harris’s recent post this evening.
Great. Now I’m hungry.
I’ve been saying for some time that Ricochet needs a business deal with a food delivery system. Max would cue them in that a post contained hunger potential; they’d put the job up for instant digital auction; and the insta-winner would guarantee to deliver the Ricochet-mentioned food within an hour to a delivery zone covering 90% of the population of the USA.
Did I mention that it was basically in a bamboo hut? That our hosts were serving us the best they had? It was very, very good. And to my shame, I did not realize at the time what a sacrifice our hosts made for some wayfaring wanderers just seeking adventure.
I have had a lot of good breakfasts, but my favorite breakfast was at a go-go bar in Bangkok Thailand in the now defunct Washington Square entertainment district. The bar was the Texas Lone Star Saloon. I got there around 9:00 or so in the morning. I wasn’t expecting much, but the Thai ladies there cooked an amazing breakfast. Fried eggs, hash browns, and patty sausage. (I have never seen patty sausage served for breakfast outside the mainland US, and patty sausage is far superior to links.) Great breakfast cooked and served by pretty ladies, Johnny Cash on the stereo system, and a cold beer Singha.
What? No kippers or blood sausage?
And a pint is a staple for a pub breakfast.
They grew oranges in Georgia. I would buy a glass of fresh-squeezed Georgian orange juice at the hard currency store for about $5.
Other than anything I cook myself, I like:
We usually don’t eat these unless we’re traveling . . .
An Irish Breakfast has puddings though
1 bacon
2 more bacon
3 more bacon
4 pancakes and sausage
5 scrambled eggs to cleanse palate
6 repeat 1-3 and 5 until buffet closes
Country Fried Steak and Eggs (Scrambled) with a side of grits with butter and cheese. With Coke to drink.
We were guests at a Passover program two years ago. The organizers rent out an entire hotel and take over the kitchen and make it Kosher for Passover. It’s a luxury; the participants (we were speakers and thus, comped) pay between $10-30,000 for the full week. The food is gourmet, but the breakfast bar was my favorite. They had someone making omelets, a full fruit salad, yoghurts, smoothies… it was amazing. I would look forward to breakfast bar way, way more than the gourmet lunches and dinners.
My favorite breakfast was in Brazil. At this hotel where I stayed occasionally, there were eggs however you wanted them prepared, cereal, bacon, sausage, oatmeal. Standard stuff so far.
But one of the things that was special was the juice bar. Guava juice, cashew juice (made from the husks of cashew tree), almond juice, orange juice, grapefruit juice, apple juice, and coconut water. Cashew juice is amazing.
Another is they would have Brazilian meatballs and black beans for breakfast. Brazilian meatballs are tangy and delicious.
Two breakfasts stand out…
(1). On vacation in Savannah with my lovely bride and our kids we stayed in a beautiful old B&B. The kitchen staff was a group of Savannah Grandmas. They were very excited to have genuine Yankees who had never had a traditional Southern breakfast. They took us into the kitchen and sat us at the kitchen table and cooked an off-the-menu feast. Biscuits and gravy. Sausage. Bacon. Shrimp and Grits. Eggs, It was spectacular !
(2). My Mom’s Easter morning breakfasts.
Polish Kielbasa, made and smoked by the butcher up the street. Slices of her baked ham. Horseradish. Home baked raisin bread. And an egg dish I have never had anywhere outside of my family, It was some sort of egg custard / cheese type thing. She’d start it the night before. 2 dozen eggs and some milk with salt pepper and vanilla s-l-o-w-l-y cooked and constantly stirred until it was the consistency of runny scrambled eggs. Then it was poured into several layers of cheesecloth and tightly wrapped into a ball. The spherical wrapped bundle would rest in the fridge overnight suspended over a dish or pie plate to drain. In the morning it got unwrapped revealing a pale yellow ball the consistency of Gouda cheese. She called it (phonetically) “sid-dek”. She spoke Polish, Russian and Slovak so I’m not even sure which language that word is from. It was one of my favorite things. Foolishly, because it looked like too much work and I was young and lazy, I never learned to make it. But I miss that breakfast.
Back in the days when I didn’t worry about wearing today what I ate yesterday, I used to stop at a diner that made what they called a Texas Breakfast. It was essentially as displayed above. These days, even though I ride my bike between 150 and 200 miles a week, my breakfast is now limited to oatmeal and yogurt. Ah, to be young again!