Strange Breakfasts

A few days ago while eating breakfast, I thought about some of the weird ones that I’d consumed through the years.

In Germany after I started school my mother often fed me a sort of eggnog, except it was a raw egg beaten with sugar – no milk. A more traditional German breakfast was crusty buns or bread with cheese. I can remember Mom feeding me the egg with a spoon. I was six at the time and school started at 8:30 so maybe I was slow in waking up and slower in wanting to eat at that hour. I still don’t like to eat early in the morning and neither does my grandson.

I don’t remember much about other breakfasts when I was young, except I know there was porridge with milk. Later in my life I learned how to make porridge interesting – with a dash of wheat germ, raisins or chopped apples, cinnamon, brown sugar, maple syrup.

On the boat that took us from Germany to Canada I remember a weird breakfast of some kind of runny egg. Someone at our table said it was powdered egg. In retrospect, I don’t think that was it. Whatever it was it wasn’t properly cooked and I didn’t eat it.

I’ve consumed many different kinds of breakfasts since then, including cereal, muffins, French toast, bacon or sausage and eggs (fried, scrambled, boiled), omelets of various descriptions, toast, croissants, danishes, German apple pancake, orange cottage cheese stacked pancakes, yogurt, cold pizza, and so on.

A couple more of my strangest breakfasts occurred in Japan. The first was after landing. We’d flown all night, following the sun and I really wanted a fairly traditional breakfast, so in my hotel I ordered bacon and eggs. The eggs were OK, the bacon however was not fried but merely smoked and probably cooked. To be polite I did manage to eat part of a slice. Later, after I’d joined my son and his partner (they were teaching English there) and we were on a short trip, we ate breakfast in an inn at an Onsen (hot springs). Besides rice (which I didn’t mind) there was a raw egg to mix in with the rice – the heat of the rice was supposed to cook it, but that didn’t work all that well. Then there was grilled fish, miso soup, Japanese pickles and vegetables. Thankfully no raw horse meat (that was at dinner).

I do like trying different foods, however, for breakfast and at other times, even if I end up not liking some of them!