THE BEST TO YOU EACH MORNING

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-01-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, although if you're an hour and a half late for dinner you may not live long enough to compare the rankings. There are studies linking breakfast to better concentration, lower incidence of diabetes and less chance of heart disease. Of course, you can find a study linking everything to just about everything else if you look hard enough. You could probably find a study linking the eating of used carburetor parts to lower heart disease, although it could give you gas. I like to eat a hearty breakfast, and I borrow a few calories from lunch to make up for it.

     As a kid I don't remember eating anything but cereal for breakfast, but that might have been because my parents had six children. A balanced meal for us was half a bowl of Sugar Smacks offset by half a bowl of Sugar Pops. To make their brands seem healthier, they've since removed any mention of the word "sugar" from all the cereals we used to love as a kid, although not the sugar itself.

     But now I'm an adult in a pandemic, and one way to make use of the slowdown is to fine-tune my breakfast making skills, so I'm going to let you in on a couple of my Sunday breakfast secrets. Making biscuits from scratch is not as hard as you might think, but it's easier to make them from batter. The batter is better with a lot of butter. Then I cut the biscuit in half, butter it, put a fried egg, some cheese and bacon on it and I save a trip to McDonald's. The same routine on a croissant goes over quite well around here. If I have a hard roll, I'll toast and butter it, insert a scrambled egg and sprinkle some cheddar and Monterey Jack. The best part is a slice of ham from the deli that I pan-fry within an inch of its life, and that goes on top of the cheese.

     Have you heard of a Dutch baby? You mix 3 eggs, 3/4 cup of milk, 3/4 cup of flour, 1/4 cup sugar, 1/4 teaspoon of salt and 1 teaspoon of vanilla. You add them to a pre-heated, liberally-buttered large skillet and bake it at 425 degrees until it puffs up like the surface of Jupiter. If it looks like Uranus you cooked it too long. Some butter and syrup and believe me you will be hailed as a modern-day hero. I've eaten so many Dutch babies that they have zero population growth right now.

     I've been called "The Leonardo da Vinci of breakfast." I invented the "toast omelet," which uses a couple pieces of buttered toast broken into little pieces, some sauteed peppers, cheese and diced tomatoes thrown in with the eggs after they're already cooking. The trick is to let the toast sit around for 15 minutes until it's brittle, and coat it with butter melted in the microwave. Here's one I call the "reverse omelet:" You take a couple tablespoons of margarine and melt it in a non-stick omelet pan, and you add the cheese first, enough cheddar and mozzarella to cover the whole bottom. Once that melts you add the beaten eggs. I like to cover it with a baking sheet to fluff up the eggs, and by that time the cheese is brown underneath. You can thank me later for saving your marriage.

     You don't need to get too fancy with the ingredients as far as I'm concerned. My wife once asked me, did you clarify the butter? No, it seems self-explanatory to me. And I don't mind cheese in a bag from the supermarket, you don't have to import it from Switzerland or anything. You can get day-old bread from the bakery and it will actually improve your French toast. Any loaf old enough to vote and the benefits start to decline. I often use margarine in place of butter, I think it's easier to cook with it and I like the taste. My family grew up using margarine, I think my parents were saving butter for the war effort, in case there was a war that listed it in the ingredients.

     It's impossible to get breakfast in Europe, because they think the concept of eating a big meal so early is vulgar. So when we're in Europe I spend much of the time before noon complaining about how I wish Europeans were as vulgar as I am. English muffins, Belgian waffles, Dutch babies and French toast are some of the great morning meals you can't get in any of those countries. In Paris they eat a baguette with Nutella on it. In Rome you can get a caffe latte with a biscotti. In Madrid they put an egg on top of anything you can order for dinner, but don't bother trying to find one for breakfast. Bacon is a code word that they haven't cracked over there yet. If you want a glass of milk you're going to have to find a willing subject and milk it yourself. None of these things is remotely useful to start your day if you're going to be walking around a museum all day, especially a boring one. Once world travel is back in the game plan I might have to think about packing a waffle iron and some batter, and let the fine folks at the TSA try to figure out what I plan to do with them.