Healthy Breakfast Ideas: Eggs & Beyond

[Evo]

A good breakfast :

Hot grits with lots of butter, salt and pepper
Heavily buttered toast
A fluffy, buttery omelette with lots of cheese, mushrooms and green peppers
Pancakes soaked with butter and syrup
A couple sausage links

Ignore this if you're not a butter person.

Evo<-----going to Gokul's for breakfast.

 

[brewnog]

Evo, Gokul, you might also like to try:

Scotch pancakes, drizzled in butter
Potato cakes (tattie scones), immersed in butter
Hot, fresh crossiants, saturated with butter
Toasted crumpets, buttered.

The crumpets are particularly good, because they have big holes in them (like a sponge), allowing the butter/crumpet ratio to approach infinity, depending on how messy you care to get.

 

[Evo]

What are scotch pancakes?

 

[brewnog]

What are scotch pancakes?

Also known as drop scones, they're a denser, thicker form of pancake. The mixture has sugar, bicarb, and syrup in it, in addition to the usual pancake ingredients.

Come to think of it, I wonder if British pancakes are different to American pancakes? Ours are akin to the French crepe. I'm thinking that Scotch pancakes might be more similar to American ones.

 

[Evo]

Yeah, ours are pretty thick. I like to put either chili or tuna salad on my pancakes.

 

[Huckleberry]

I see we have another grits fan with Gokul in the thread! Brewnog's scotch pancakes and potato cakes sound interesting. I'd like to give them a go.

American pancakes seem to be a little different. I made some in Mexico and they seemed surprised that they were round. I didn't quite understand that. It seeme dlike it was something they were completely unfamiliar with. They don't eat much bacon either. I had a hard time finding 'tocino' in the super market. I can't imagine life without my BLT sandwiches.

Anyway, pancakes that I'm familiar with are about half an inch thick and 6 inches wide and circular. They can be made from several different grains. They are soft and spongy and soak up all the butter and syrup. I like to eat mine with sliced fruit. Almost any kind will do.

 

[brewnog]

Yeah, ours are pretty thick. I like to put either chili or tuna salad on my pancakes.

Anyway, pancakes that I'm familiar with are about half an inch thick and 6 inches wide and circular. They can be made from several different grains. They are soft and spongy and soak up all the butter and syrup. I like to eat mine with sliced fruit. Almost any kind will do.

You guys should try some real pancakes.

Pint of milk 8oz flour, 1 egg, a pinch of salt, and some melted butter... Blitz it up, let it stand for an hour or two, then fry the hell out of A THIN LAYER in some more butter. The thinner the better. Prepare to throw the first one in the bin.

 

[Evo]

You should try some thin pancakes.

Pint of milk 8oz flour, 1 egg, a pinch of salt, and some melted butter... Blitz it up, let it stand for an hour or two, then fry the hell out of A THIN LAYER in some more butter.

That does sound like a crepe.

 

[Integral]

Sounds like we are now moving into the realm of favorite breakfast.

How about fresh biscuits covered in rich chipped beef gravy. The best dried beef is found in the Pennsylvania Dutch country.

And then there is crisp fried hash browns covered in Cheddar Cheese (Tilamook, specifically) with sour cream and salsa and an over easy fried egg thrown in middle. Can't forget the rasher of crisp fried bacon.

These are in no particular order.

 

[brewnog]

How about fresh biscuits covered in rich chipped beef gravy. The best dried beef is found in the Pennsylvania Dutch country.

Sorry, for a moment there I almost thought you said "biscuits in gravy".


WAIT! YOU DID!

ARE YOU ON CRACK, MAN?!

I dunk my Rich Tea in my tea, and occasionally in some hot chocolate, but in GRAVY? For BREAKFAST?!

 

[Evo]

I think American biscuits are different from what you call a biscuit.

 

[brewnog]

I think American biscuits are different from what you call a biscuit.

So what's a biscuit then?!

I love this conversation.


"I like grits"
"What are grits?"
"They're like porridge"
"No they're not! But I like pancakes"
"I like thick pancakes"
"Pancakes are thin! Do you mean a Scotch pancake?"
"No, a pancake. What's a Scotch pancake?"
"It's like an American pancake"
"Forget pancakes, I like biscuits"
"What's a biscuit?"

What next? Muffins? Don't get me started on muffins...

 

[Huckleberry]

We need to have an international PF get together and cook all our favorite foods for each other. I love trying new foods.

I like biscuits and gravy too. I like biscuits best when they have a crispy shell, but are soft and steamy in the middle and can sop up lots of gravy.

 

[Evo]

So what's a biscuit then?!

Big lumps of baked dough. It's a type of bread...kind of.

http://familyfun.go.com/Resources/Cookbook/FeatureRecipeImages/ff1104-jg-biscuits.jpg

 

[brewnog]

Big lumps of baked dough. It's a type of bread...kind of.

http://familyfun.go.com/Resources/Cookbook/FeatureRecipeImages/ff1104-jg-biscuits.jpg

Ahhhh! I know what you mean. I'm not really sure what we call them.


Here is a biscuit (a Hobnob, to be precise):

And here is a half-eaten biscuit:

 

[Huckleberry]

Oh, that looks like a cookie. No wonder you were thrown by biscuits and gravy. Cookies and gravy would be gross.

 

[Integral]

Sorry, for a moment there I almost thought you said "biscuits in gravy".


WAIT! YOU DID!

ARE YOU ON CRACK, MAN?!

I dunk my Rich Tea in my tea, and occasionally in some hot chocolate, but in GRAVY? For BREAKFAST?!

I am guessing this must have come from the german side of my family. Yep bisciuts and gravy for breakfast. Good stuff.

 

[Math Is Hard]

One of the things I love about PF is that it promotes cross-cultural understanding. Ah, the tragedies that have been averted!
Just think - I could have gone to England and ordered whipped cream on my pie, and brewnog might have come to the U.S. and dipped his buttermilk biscuit in his tea!

 

[GCT]

What is a healthy breakfast? Eggs? What else? I think eating waffles with butter and syrup everyday is a bad idea, and I am wondering about what I could switch to that is more healthy. Gracie!

A nice hearty bowl of cereal...Total, although I would prefer the grits

 

[Moonbear]

You guys should try some real pancakes.

Pint of milk 8oz flour, 1 egg, a pinch of salt, and some melted butter... Blitz it up, let it stand for an hour or two, then fry the hell out of A THIN LAYER in some more butter. The thinner the better. Prepare to throw the first one in the bin.

I add a bit of sugar to make crepes, but that's the basic recipe. American pancakes, generally, would include those ingredients, plus sugar, substitute some buttermilk for the regular milk, and add baking powder (I don't know what's in baking powder, but it makes things puffy). Oh, heck, I just buy the mix and add milk. They're cooked on a griddle (to me, a scone is something you bake, though it uses a very similar recipe).

I don't know what sort of pancakes Huck has been eating. Mine are nowhere near 1/2" thick! Maybe 0.5 cm on a really fat one.

As for biscuits, those are basically flour, buttermilk, lard, baking powder and a touch of salt. You have to be really gentle about not kneading them too much so they stay light and flaky. And then when they are done baking, you smother them in butter! Yum.

Yes, what the British call biscuits, we call cookies. Though, sometimes you can find an odd brand here or there that calls them tea biscuits here.

Hard to believe we speak the same language, huh?

Cornmeal muffins are yummy! (I sure hope we all use the same word for muffins.)

Well, except we also have these things called English muffins that nobody in Britain recognizes as anything they've ever seen before. We toast them, and they have nooks and crannies so you can drown them in butter and it doesn't run off! Even better, put a fried egg, a slice of your favorite cheese, and a couple slices of bacon onto one and eat it like a sandwich! Now that's a good breakfast!

 

[Huckleberry]

I don't know what sort of pancakes Huck has been eating. Mine are nowhere near 1/2" thick! Maybe 0.5 cm on a really fat one.

You've got too much water in your mix. The thicker the batter the fluffier the pancake. I like nice, fat pancakes.

Oh, I make those English muffin breakfasts too. Nice and quick and cheaper than the junk at McDonalds. Those are good stuff.

 

[Moonbear]

One of the things I love about PF is that it promotes cross-cultural understanding. Ah, the tragedies that have been averted!
Just think - I could have gone to England and ordered whipped cream on my pie, and brewnog might have come to the U.S. and dipped his buttermilk biscuit in his tea!

Oh, a few other food items that have different names in the US and Britain.

What they call chips, we call fries (or French fries). What we call chips, they call crisps.

I haven't the slightest inkling of a clue what bubbles and squeak is, but I hear about it a lot from Brits. None of these are breakfast foods though, at least to the best of my knowledge.

 

[Evo]

You've got too much water in your mix. The thicker the batter the fluffier the pancake. I like nice, fat pancakes.

Oh, I make those English muffin breakfasts too. Nice and quick and cheaper than the junk at McDonalds. Those are good stuff.

The eggamuffin (ok, bad old joke that no one will get)

Has anyone noticed that the food at McDonald's is getting smaller? I actually got an egg McMuffin the other day (I was desparate) and I swear it was the size of a silver dollar.

 

[Moonbear]

You've got too much water in your mix. The thicker the batter the fluffier the pancake. I like nice, fat pancakes.

There is NO water in my mix! I ignore the instructions and use milk instead of water. I don't like those thick, cakey tasting pancakes. I prefer them thinner and fried in a bit of oil or shortening (nothing so insane as deep frying, just to coat the pan) instead of on a dry skillet.

 

[Moonbear]

Has anyone noticed that the food at McDonald's is getting smaller? I actually got an egg McMuffin the other day (I was desparate) and I swear it was the size of a silver dollar.

I have to be incredibly desperate to eat any breakfast food from McDonalds. If I'm on the road and need to buy a breakfast, I prefer to find a bagel shop.

 

[Andy]

I hate mcdonalds, but for some reason i keep going back. Breakfast has got to be a nice greasy fry up for me! Unless i am being healthy in wwhich case i skip breakfast.

 

[fuzzyfelt]

Hi all, this is my first venture here into general discussion.
Brewnog, I have been living in your very fine country for over a year now and incidentally absoluetly love it, but where do I find some thin bacon that crisps up really nicely for say with eggs benedict? Either I'm an absolute neanderthal and don't appreciate the subtleties of english bacon, or there is something seriously wrong with it. When you buy it, its pale and thick and soft and when you cook it up it doesn't change much!
And if its any help to anyone I grew up calling scottish pancakes 'pikelets'.

 

[Huckleberry]

I don't eat at McDonalds anymore. Their breakfast menu always upsets me anyway. It is so expensive and the servings are so small they are unamerican. And I can only get the breakfast menu in the morning and the burger menu in the afternoon. I don't even bother. If I want breakfast I'll go to a 24 hour IHOP.

Are there 24 hour restaurants in England? An Australian woman from Perth once told me she was amazed at IHOP because she had never seen a restaurant open 24 hours.

 

[Echo 6 Sierra]

A version of SOS I learned to make a long time ago is:
1# browned hamburger (drained)
1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup
garlic salt, black pepper, and Worchestershire to taste.

Let it simmer till its thick and then spoon over white rice.
Throw on a couple of fried eggs, add some pan fried pork snosages, portugese sausage, fried spam w/brown sugar, or some chorizo fried till its bacon-y, buttered toast made under the broiler OR fried in the chorizo pan and you can hear your arteries seizing up. Wash it down with a glass of milk and you won't need to eat for about 8 hours.

WARNING: After eating the above meal you will most definitely need coffee, preferably a double espresso.

 

[Danger]

Hi al

Hi Fi10 char

 

[Gokul43201]

And then there is crisp fried hash browns covered in Cheddar Cheese

Yikes ! I forgot my hash browns !

 

[Gokul43201]

Hi Fi

Seconded

 

[brewnog]

Hi fi!

Pikelets is the word I was looking for, thanks!

Moonbear, bubble and squeak is a bit of a speciality! It's a left-over meal, particularly for use on Boxing day, or mid-week when you're trying to finish off lots of food from the sunday roast.

It's basically lots of mashed up veg (potatoes, carrots, cabbage, and anything else you like) with lots of salt and pepper (and some Henderson's relish, but NOBODY here will have a clue about that!), all fried up in a pan.

I used to absolutely adore the stuff, until my mum was cooking it one particularly hungover day. The smell made me retch, and it has now joined eggs and tuna in my "food which makes me retch" category.

 

[Pengwuino]

I made hte biggest breakfast burrito a few days ago with the breakfast my mother made. I got this huge tortilla and threw in some eggs, potatos, sausage, salsa... reallllly generously... oh man that was good stuff. The size is the improtant part though. THe tortilla was bigger then my plate! And i filled it to a point where the 2 ends barely wrapped over each other :D

 

[hitssquad]

The eggamuffin (ok, bad old joke that no one will get)

Eggamuffin yeah.

 

[brewnog]

Oh, I forgot to answer fi's question.

Any half-decent butcher will cut bacon as thin as you like. Problem solved!

 

[Moonbear]

Pikelets is the word I was looking for, thanks!

Is that English or Americanish? I've never heard of that before either.

Moonbear, bubble and squeak is a bit of a speciality! It's a left-over meal, particularly for use on Boxing day, or mid-week when you're trying to finish off lots of food from the sunday roast.

It's basically lots of mashed up veg (potatoes, carrots, cabbage, and anything else you like) with lots of salt and pepper (and some Henderson's relish, but NOBODY here will have a clue about that!), all fried up in a pan.

Hmm...sounds like a good leftover type meal. Do you fry it until crispy/browned, or just to heat it? To me, potatoes don't taste good reheated unless something else is added to them. I don't know why, but just reheated by themselves, they seem to have an odd taste to me, sort of like instant potatoes taste. It must be my 1/4 Britishness that makes me like these things (everyone else gripes about British food, but when I was there, I could have eaten in the pubs every night...good comfort food served there, like thick brown gravy on mashed potatoes, and mushy peas are tasty peas...still trying to figure out why you all call them mushy though, they were neither mashed, which is what I was envisioning and fearing a bit when they came with my order, nor cooked to a mushy texture, at least no more so than any peas are).

 

[1123581321]

i usually start the day riding my bike down the road at 0600 with a glazed donut in one hand and a coffee in the other. i am really good at riding no handed, i can even turn and everything

fibonacci

 

[singleton]

I have a heaping bowl of vector cereal with skim milk, 300ml pure OJ with extra pulp, 300ml wild blueberries, multivitamin, aspirin and omega3 fish oil extract.

I eat that every morning.

 

[brewnog]

Is that English or Americanish? I've never heard of that before either.

I have no idea. Probably British. It sounds kinda Lancastrian, but I dunno.

Hmm...sounds like a good leftover type meal. Do you fry it until crispy/browned, or just to heat it?

As crispy as you like. It's cooked when it all sticks together into a kind of, urm, thick pancake, golden brown on the outside but still squidgy in the middle.

still trying to figure out why you all call them mushy though, they were neither mashed, nor cooked to a mushy texture

Are you sure you had mushy peas, and not just, urm, peas? Mushy peas are amongst the mushiest things in the world!

Did they look like this?
http://www.os42.com/wp-images/mushypeas.jpg

 

[Math Is Hard]

Did they look like this?
http://www.os42.com/wp-images/mushypeas.jpg

I'm going to be sick. We need a just about to barf smiley -
somewhere between this and this

 

[brewnog]

I'm going to be sick.

Yeah, they look so disgusting that I didn't dare try them for the first 18 years of my life.

You only really have them with Fish n Chips.

Chips are NOT french fries. French fries are thin, and cooked in vegetable oil (we have french fries in the UK too). Chips are thick, and cooked (hopefully) in animal fat, although most places nowadays prefer veg oil so that they can sell them to vegematarians.

 

[Danger]

I'm going to be sick.

Good grief, woman! What's the matter with you? I thought you were a Texan. Throw some red chunks in there and you have guacomoli.

 

[brewnog]

They've always reminded me of the Dentrassi food that Ford Prefect gives Arthur Dent to eat when they first get onto the Vogon ship in the TV series of HHGG.

 

[Moonbear]

Are you sure you had mushy peas, and not just, urm, peas? Mushy peas are amongst the mushiest things in the world!

Hey! No, that's not what they gave me. It very clearly said on the menu that whatever the other thing I ordered was served with mushy peas, and that picture is what I was expecting to get, with a good degree of uncertainty as to whether I'd eat them or not, but since they just came as a side, I figured give it a try. I was surprised when they came out as whole peas, and then decided it must have just been an odd name for peas (they are definitely different peas than we have in the U.S. - sweeter). I was cheated out of the true British experience! They must've heard my American accent and decided to spare me the experience. How truly disappointing.

 

[Moonbear]

Chips are thick, and cooked (hopefully) in animal fat, although most places nowadays prefer veg oil so that they can sell them to vegematarians.

Those are french fries too. That's how my mom always made them. The skinny ones are shoestring french fries (you can get french fries in a variety of shapes and sizes).

 

[JasonRox]

I thought you said healthy breakfast.

I eat... every morning.

2 Egg Whites
1 Whole Egg, but only eat half the yolk
2 Pieces of Ham
1 Bowl of All Bran Cereal
1-2 Glasses of Orange Juice
2 Glasses of Water

I get a wide variety of vitamins and minerals, while keeping it relatively low in saturated fat. I think I get about 1.5-2 grams of saturated fat, for breakfast.

Edit: All Bran Cereal is plain... no milk.

 

[Moonbear]

I thought you said healthy breakfast.

He did, but we were still hungry, so went for a good breakfast instead, and then it was lunch time, so we started in on that.

 

[SOS2008]

hmmm...

What's breakfast? I've heard of brunch. Coffee good.

 

[Huckleberry]

hmmm...

What's breakfast? I've heard of brunch. Coffee good.

No breakfast? Not even a bagel and a piece of fruit to go with that coffee? How do you make it through your day?