Learning to be a Morning Person

I am not a morning person. At least, I thought I wasn't a morning person, until lately. Working nights at a bookstore (as part of my employee contract, I'm not allowed to blog about it, so I will just leave the name of the chain anonymous), I realized that my sleeping-in habits weren't really conducive to having a life. When you get up at noon and go into work at three, where is your day? It doesn't exist. I struggled for awhile, then Dan got another job that has him up at seven most mornings. Slowly over the past few weeks, I have been easing into the habit of getting up with him (today I managed 9:30, which is pretty epic for me). This new sleeping pattern has shown me a whole new world of life, and let me tell you: I love mornings. I have time to read about food, I have time to write, I have time to make things for later in the night or the following day, I have time for breakfast.

I've never been much of a breakfast person at any point in my life. I remember trying to choke down breakfast in the mornings as a second grader with my mom telling me how important breakfast was. I just couldn't do it. I think it's because I associate breakfast with all of these heavy greasy and/or sweet foods. I'm not ready for that mere moments after waking up. As I've grown, I've realized that it was up to me to shape my breakfast into something more personally palatable. But, I've still been ignoring the meal and waiting to eat until noon or one when I finally found myself feeling hungry.

Not today! Today I woke up, I made coffee, and I decided I was going to have breakfast. I've been carrying around these packets of instant grits since last year when I got into a grits phase (and in college, instant everything was the name of the game), so I decided that would be the base of my meal.

Then I fried up an egg. Now, I may be a little pathetic when it comes to making scrambled eggs, and my omelettes are admittedly an Americanized diner/college cafeteria version of the French classic. But my fried eggs are where I really shine. All you need is a dab of butter over medium heat until it gets a little bubbly, then you drop your egg right into the pan:

Cook the egg until the whites are firm enough to slide a spatula under. I like my whites well-cooked, if you like yours more on the runny side, leave more of the center white uncooked. Then gently slide your spatula under and flip the egg. If you want your yokes runny, you only need to let this side cook for a few seconds, if you want your yoke fully cooked, let it cook for about 30 seconds to a minute (if you're going for fully cooked, you can always flip the egg over carefully for a quick peak and flip it back if it needs a little more time).

I like to sprinkle some salt and (a lot) of black pepper on mine. Today I served the egg over the grits and had a side of tortilla chips and salsa (the same from my juevos athenos omelette).

I also had a glass of my hand-squeezed orange juice with it. Yum!

As I'm writing this, I'm eating my lunch consisting of leftovers from last night. I just mixed my salad with some leftover tomatoes and string beans with a touch of my salad dressing. I didn't warm anything up and it's all wonderful cold and mixed up together! And my salad dressing seems to be holding up well on the counter. In fact, it's even better now since all of the ingredients have had some quality time together and are really blending and enjoying each other. In fact, I think I'm going to take what's left into work to eat during my break and pass up my normal sugary cafe treat.

(One of these days I will start drinking more water, I drink entirely too much coffee.)

Oh, and we definitely woke up to snow today after I had just been marveling at how all the snow from before was finally gone. C'est la vie. It is pretty.

Our backyard: