Hello and welcome to perhaps the first ever edition of Laura’s Breakfast. Don’t get used to it. Today’s breakfast was vegg salad on sourdough toast with tomato slices. I didn’t get a good picture, so here’s a terrible picture.
I’m not really a morning person, and I’m not usually hungry til about 11 am/noon. Those are the top 2 reasons why I rarely eat breakfast. Also, traditional American breakfast foods don’t really get me going. I love dinner leftovers for breakfast, or a tuna sandwich, or some steak. It’s basically lunch now and I’m hungry again.
When you stop to think about it, as I apparently have the time to do, it’s funny that even as adults we adhere to such rigid ideas about what is appropriate to eat at certain types of day. Scrambled eggs as a midday snack feels kind of crazy, as does a roast chicken with potatoes at 8 am. But bacon and hash browns and french toast (aka dessert) is acceptable for some reason??
When I was working in Italy one spring/summer, on Easter we had a special “colazione del contadino” - the farmer’s breakfast - which was hyped up big time the night before. On the table the next morning was your standard Denny’s fare: meat, eggs, bread, fruit. Every other day was just a pastry and a latte. (But god forbid you have espresso with milk in the afternoon in Italy, you might actually get arrested.)
Farmers theoretically need to eat all this stuff, but do non-farmers? I think Big Milk took advantage of this to push the idea of “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” to sell more milk.
One time I read a click baity article about what CEOs eat for breakfast. Some swear by eating a full meal. Some swear by eating nothing. My point in writing these words, probably the most boring you’ve ever read, is to illustrate that we as a nation (and maybe world?) have a confusing relationship with breakfast.
This morning I woke up hungry, I think because maybe it’s possible that swimming regularly kicks my dusty, creaking metabolism to life. Who can say. In my fridge was a block of extra silken tofu that I’ve been wanting to use creatively and some celery I bought to eventually make this amazing looking salad.
I drained the block of tofu, dumped it in a bowl, and mixed it with finely chopped yellow onion and celery, mayo, a squirt of yellow mustard, black pepper, white pepper (idk lol), lots of salt, and my homemade everything bagel seasoning (containing sesame and poppy seeds, crispy fried garlic, and caraway seeds). If I had celery salt, I would have added that too!
If you haven’t figured out by now, I called it vegg salad because it’s like egg salad only almost vegan (let’s pretend my mayo is vegan). Also, the 16 oz block was on sale for $1.99! Egg prices, etc etc.
I didn’t even need to cube the tofu, since it was extra silken it just broke down from stirring. When I do this again, I will probably use just silken to keep a little more texture.
You might be thinking this looks like an unappealing bowl of mush. Fair. But it was so deeply delicious and satisfying, you’ll just have to take my word for it. I ate it on some amazing sourdough from a bakery near me called Simply Bread, with a few thick slices of surprisingly nice tomatoes for this time of year. I feel like the rules of produce seasonality/the universe/anything don’t really apply to Florida.
Please appreciate this countertop color story. Honey mangoes are $2 each and they are literally my heroin.
I think long and hard before I buy a new kitchen appliance - I have an even smaller kitchen now than I did in Brooklyn, and I hate holding on to things that do not serve me.
I’ve been watching one of my favorite food influencers make sauces, dressings, smoothies, and dips in her NutriBullet for months, and decided it’s compact and easy enough to clean that I would actually use it to make new things. I was right!
The slightly cute part about this NutriBullet origin story is that I had been vocal about wanting one for a few days, and for once, John secretly paid attention to my incessant blitherings-on about cooking.
When I proudly showed him my NutriPurchase when he got home from work a few days later, he escorted me out to the trunk of the car to reveal the NutriBullet he had bought as a surprise for Valentine’s Day. Don’t we just hate him so much?
Ooh love this idea
Poor John :(