When Home is... a Change in Breakfast Routine

Why does it seem wrong to have your normal weekly breakfast on a Sunday? On those Sundays when I do just throw a couple of slices of bread in the toaster and pour a mug of tea while pulling out the boring Weet-bix carton from the pantry for the kids, I find the day feels distinctly un-weekend-ish.

On a Sunday when one of us does pull the carton of eggs out of the fridge or finds a packet of bacon in the back of the freezer, the day feels much less structured and full of possibilities. Strange, given that there are only so many ways a Sunday can be full of possibilities with three children and one who sleeps in the afternoon but there you go: the power of bacon.

Today there was no packet of bacon. There was a tub of fresh ricotta, however, and a husband who reached for Bill Granger’s ricotta hotcakes recipe. What better way to mark a Sunday and particularly fitting as I am currently writing up an interview with cookbook author Tessa Kiros. It wouldn’t feel the same if I was eating a buttered slice of slightly stale multigrain while writing about her kitchen in the hills of Tuscany, would it?!

Her interview will be posted shortly, but in the meantime here’s that Sunday Ricotta Hotcakes recipe... the only downside was that with five of us there no longer seems to be quite the same number of hotcakes to go around.



Bill Granger’s Ricotta Hotcakes (taken from Sydney Food)
1 1/3 cups ricotta
¾ cup milk
4 eggs, separated
1 cup plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
Pinch of salt
50g butter

Method
Place ricotta, milk and egg yolks in a mixing bowl and mix to combine.
Sift the flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl. Add the ricotta mixture and mix until just combined.
Place egg whites in a clean, dry bowl and beat until stiff peaks form. Fold egg whites through batter in two batches, with a large metal spoon.
Lightly grease large non-stick fry pan with a small portion of the butter and drop two tablespoons of batter per hotcake into the pan. Cook over low to medium heat for two minutes or until hotcakes have golden undersides. Turn hotcakes and cook on the other side until golden and cooked through.

When Home is... Weekend Breakfasts

My mother and sister came over for breakfast this morning and while I thought about cooking something ‘special’, I couldn’t help but return to a family favourite: bacon. Weekend breakfasts for me have always been about bacon. The smell of it sizzling away takes me straight back to lazy mornings spent in pyjamas cocooned at home. And so it was, bacon sandwiches for our family on this Sunday morning. Only today my children were the only ones in their pyjamas.

It’s not often we ‘breakfast’ with other people, is it? For a start, it’s too early to feel sociable and we have ‘brunch’ for those occasions anyway. And thank you 19th century British students for creating this slang term to describe a combination of breakfast and lunch.

In 1895, Guy Beringer wrote for British magazine Hunter’s Weekly an article titled Brunch: A Plea, ‘Instead of England’s early Sunday dinner, a post-church ordeal of heavy meats and savory pies, why not a new meal, served around noon, that starts with tea or coffee . . . By eliminating the need to get up early on Sunday, brunch would make life brighter for Saturday night carousers.’

And let’s be honest, even if you’re not a ‘Saturday night carouser’ surely no one really wants to be entertaining at 7am no matter how great the company is.

But people’s breakfast habits and what their food of choice is at this time of day can tell us a lot. When I first moved out of home, I shared a flat with a very close friend. We’d shared all kinds of intimacies and secrets over the years yet on our first morning together when I set the table for us to have tea and toast she looked surprised.

‘Wow,’ she said holding her mug, ‘I usually just eat breakfast standing up. Do you always have it at the table?’

I hadn’t realised there was another way to have breakfast and over our time together she took to enjoying her tea and toast at the table and I took to enjoying eating while leaning against the counter. But rebellions from upbringing aside, I remember us both feeling we had learnt something about the other; something very personal.

Another old friend recently told me as an aside that her family makes pancakes every Sunday morning. I’ve known this friend for nearly 20 years and had no idea she ate pancakes so regularly yet I could tell you all her favourite dinners.

Perhaps because breakfast is usually eaten before people are showered or dressed or even fully awake it takes on such an intimate feel. We stayed with friends interstate a couple of years ago and despite sharing many lunches, dinners and even a couple of weekends away, it wasn’t until we sat down to breakfast in their house, all of us in pyjamas sporting fantastic bed hair, boxes of cereal on the bare tabletop, the smell of toast in the toaster with mugs of tea and coffee, bottles of milk, packets of butter, open jars of jam and vegemite surrounding us that I felt our friendship had reached a much higher level.

All pretence gone, our lives and homes lie completely exposed at such an early hour of the day.