It’s What’s For Breakfast
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: Hauganes, Iceland. We’ve rented a house, looking out over a fjord, in the far north of Iceland. The village has a population of 140–well, I guess it’s 142, now that we’re here.
It’s What’s For Breakfast
You know that old saw about breakfast being the most important meal of the day? If the rest of your life is in a more-or-less constant state of flux, breakfast takes on disproportionate importance. It becomes the foundation of predictability that makes work routines, good humor, and resilience possible.
In general, my preferred breakfast is some variation on the oatmeal theme: if the weather is hot, I like my oats soaked overnight in yogurt, and eaten muesli-style, with fruit and/or nuts. If the weather is cold, plain old oatmeal makes me incredibly happy, especially with fruit, or some kind of nut butter. I also love avocado toast, but only if the toast and the avocado are really good. Store-bought loaf bread just makes me feel sad. And very occasionally, for a special treat, I love-love-love a good pastry (but not a mediocre pastry—that’s just a waste of anticipation and calories).
Lee and I generally divide our time between Airbnbs and hotels. Apartment breakfasts are usually pretty easy: I find the nearest grocery and stock up on some kind of oats. Sometimes we have to go to multiple shops to get it just right, but food shopping is half the fun of traveling, so that’s okay. Lee claims to not mind. He’s a keeper.
It took me a while, though, to learn the importance of carefully managing my breakfast needs. In the beginning, I had this idea that I’d embrace the local breakfast culture. Even now, I sometimes have no choice, if a hotel is more local than not. Just last week, in a particularly beautiful little boutique hotel in south Iceland, we were served a plate of shockingly pink cold-cuts (in ordinary times, I’d just avoid the meat on the buffet, but buffets have been canceled here). I stuck with the skyr (Icelandic yogurt).
We spent our first full winter of travel, back in 2016, in Southeast Asia—I couldn’t wait to wade in and embrace a culture that seemed so different from my own. I quickly discovered that the breakfast of choice in many Asian cultures is some variation on the theme of noodle soup. Usually in a very porky broth. At breakfast time in Bangkok, there’s a noodle soup vendor on almost every corner. For what it’s worth, I love a good (vegetarian) noodle soup—just not for breakfast. There’s also plenty of congee, or jook, which I also love, but again—not for breakfast (fun fact: I grew up on congee, but my mother called it turkey-rice, and it was one of my favorite things about Thanksgiving leftovers).
It took me about five minutes, and one ‘breakfast’ food tour in Hong Kong to revert to my western roots. When we got to Bangkok, Toby (who had been living there for a couple of years at that point) showed me where all the good pastry shops were, and where to buy oatmeal. Apparently my intrepid-ness doesn’t kick in until at least mid-morning.
It’s hit-or-miss, though. I don’t know if it’s my tastebuds, or my need for routine, or maybe there’s a tiny little chromosomal memory that gets switched on, but there are other breakfasts—radically different from anything I grew up with—that make me happy all the way down to my toes. In Ethiopia, there was always injera at breakfast, soaked through with some kind of brick-red spicy sauce. Along those same lines, during our one good week in Mexico before 2020 went down the tubes, I stuffed myself full of chilaquiles every morning—one of the best breakfast foods ever invented.
And then there was India. Breakfast in India is glorious, especially if it’s home-cooked. We spent 8 nights at a homestay in Jaipur; every morning we were served something from a different Indian state. There were things that looked kind of like pancakes (but weren’t); there was something that vaguely resembled grits (but wasn’t). It was all completely new to me, but at the same time, deeply comforting. I’m not sure how that’s possible, unless maybe I was Indian in a previous life.
In places that get a lot of tourists, hotel breakfasts are pretty manageable, because they need to cater to such a wide range of guests. We can pick and choose—skip the noodle soup, have toast and eggs. In one hotel in Myanmar, we walked into the breakfast room to find that the buffet was divided into no fewer than seven stations: I don’t remember them all, but there was Indian breakfast, western breakfast, Asian breakfast, Burmese breakfast. In Europe, there’s almost always cheese, yogurt, and plenty of bread. Sometimes I buy a jar of supplemental peanut butter. In Vietnam, there was always yogurt, and often someone making banana pancakes to order—I’m not sure what that’s about, but it’s pretty reliable, and banana pancakes are yummy. In Chile, there was always cake. Doesn’t that sound like decadent early-morning fun? I kept sending pictures to our kids. Cake! For breakfast! Four kinds!
Guess what? After three or four days of cake for breakfast, you start to worry about diabetes.
My hotel-breakfast back-up plan used to be scrambled eggs (the one breakfast food that is more or less universal), until we got to South America. Scrambled eggs, it turns out, can vary widely. In South America, they are generally on the runny side. Often, very runny. For the record, I didn’t start eating eggs until I was pregnant, and I’m still very fussy about them. I only eat them scrambled dry. Basically, I think of eggs as a vehicle for cheese. One of the worst melt-downs I’ve had since we started traveling was in Bolivia, triggered by cold, runny eggs (and a pile of dried alpaca fetuses for sale just outside the front door, but really, it was day 3 of those nasty eggs that pushed me over the edge).
Our South Korean quarantine took my breakfast challenges to new heights (depths?)—most days I got a large salad which, more often than not, had a pile of beef strips on top. I haven’t eaten beef since 1993. (That quarantine was definitely when my food-hoarding habit got out of hand.)
But the biggest (and funniest) breakfast problem we’ve ever encountered was at a hotel in Luang Prabang, Laos. Lee, as is his habit, was ready and waiting when the dining room opened. I’m a little slower to get going. A few minutes after he started eating, a Chinese tour group entered. Lee says it was like watching a carefully planned military assault—they came, they saw, they cleared the buffet. Alone at a four-top, he was quickly joined by a couple looking for seats. They spoke no English; they smiled politely, then bent low over full plates, and shoveled in the food. Lee texted to warn me that if I didn’t hurry, there wouldn’t be anything left.
By the time I got there, the group had done their damage and left. The staff were on the floor—no joke—slumped against the wall behind the buffet, shell-shocked. Chafing dishes stood empty, lids askew; the tables were littered with plates and cups. There were a couple of slices of cold white toast in a basket, and a few crumbles of scrambled egg in the corners of a pan. I moved along the buffet, looking for something to eat, until finally one of the servers pulled himself up off the floor, and gestured weakly around the room. “I’ll get some more eggs,” he said, and limped away.
Take care,
Lisa
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