Breaking fast can be fun

Breakfast, the most important meal of the day? Not for me. When I see those commercials for the Big Breakfast, I get sleepy.  Eating one of those will send me off to La La Land, providing I can choke it down in the first place. I guess the trick for me would be to eat a lot of bacon, not that much egg, and definitely no pancakes — although a close cousin, the waffle, does work.

Like a jungle cat, having eaten my fill I retire for a nap. Sometimes this is a very long nap. Jungle cats can sleep 22 out of 24 hours. I only sleep about half of that. I don’t know who these people are that can stuff themselves and then go out and cut down a tree.

Breakfast items go in and out of favor. Eggs, bacon and sausage used to be the standby with oatmeal thrown in once in a while. Eggs have been good for us and not good for us so many times that I have lost track which it is at the moment.

Some people believe that brown eggs are healthier, which is a way of putting a spin on not as harmful. Eggs are supposed to be loaded with cholesterol, but which cholesterol? Is it the good kind or the bad kind? This is as confusing as The Lone Ranger, a good guy who wears a mask and has no visible means of support.

Bacon used to be full of nitrates, or was it nitrites? One is fertilizer and the other can be used to make explosions, I think. Either way this can’t be good. So they took the whatever out of bacon, but it still tastes the same. This seems like a miracle. I am suspicious, but have decided to leave well enough alone. I really like bacon. A lot of people seem to be with me on this. Whenever the fast food chains do not know what else to do, they add bacon and sales go up. Even the fried chicken people are adding bacon now. I have been meaning to get some of that.

Sausage is something you don’t want to know too much about. For me, sausage is like white wine — you only order it if they are out of red, which in this analogy would be bacon. My method is to cook it until it is about the consistency of a Tootsie Roll. Anything subjected to that amount of heat can’t hurt you.

Oatmeal is incontrovertibly healthy and incontrovertibly yucky. I know someone who tried to convince their kids that it was porridge, like the Three Bears and Goldilocks ate. Kids are not fooled by this.

I would have added bacon.

Bill Abrams resides in Pine Plains, where he contemplates the breakfast menu day in and day out.