breakfast
Whole wheat English muffins
There is undeniably something comforting about routine. After all, we are supposedly creatures of habit. The past couple of years have been rather testy around here. And, admittedly, I wouldn’t exactly call myself a morning person even at the best of times. Since becoming a mother, usually an internal autopilot gets me through almost an hour of being awake and attending to others’ needs. Unfortunately, I never trained myself to skip breakfast and therefore sustenance is needed quite quickly. In a sense, I’ve instinctively taken inspiration from the Italian/French where breakfast is typically cappuccino and pastry. Only my adapted version is a cappuccino with a sprinkle of cinnamon and a whole wheat English muffin topped with homemade mayonnaise and a dash of cayenne pepper. Whether you are after English muffins or just easy portioned bread items, this recipe has been tried and tested over and over again.
Cheddar scones with dill
Somehow I regularly forget how awesome scones are. It has to be one of the easier and quicker ways to produce something satisfying and bread-like. And then those endless variations limited only by one’s imagination or personal taste preferences… Obviously, as someone who often bakes on impulse and therefore dreads the entire “bring to room temperature” step, I love scones of all kinds for keeping it simple and instead needing everything to be immediately out of the refrigerator. In other words, with such short baking times and no need for planned prep, homemade scones in about 30 minutes are exceptionally obtainable. There has already been a sweet recipe, so this time we have savoury cheddar scones with dill.
Ricotta pancakes
Who knew that a good way to lose all of one’s free time is to have 3 babies in about that many years? To illustrate further: this simple and rather stress-less recipe for quick ricotta pancakes has been photographed over a year ago. Variations of these pancakes happened multiple times during that time frame; much to the ecstatic thrill of the earlier mentioned babies. All you really need to make this recipe is some kind of blender. Did I mention that taste can be customized with a single ingredient switch? The pink hue here is freeze-dried strawberry powder. Alternatively, it can be citrus zest or even vanilla extract.
Cheese waffles
Ah, good intentions. Do they ever really work out exactly as originally envisioned? Let’s say you have a family vacation coming up. In view of that, you do your best to get organized and prepared. Aside from trying to predict what essentials might be needed for 3 children ranging in ages from 3 years to 3 months in a totally different climate, you also obviously try to get everything else in order. Like align a couple of recipes for your blog. Get everything photographed and almost ready to be published so updates are semi regular. Then you dream up a scenario of nearly utopian proportions that while the children are all napping you can work on the posts. As if you have never been on a family vacation with your children before. As if you don’t know that they will be in a wanderlust-induced high before you even enter the airport to depart. And there will be essentially no naps throughout the entire trip, certainly not any simultaneous ones. Leaving you happy and fulfilled but also extremely stripped of any illusion of free time. Lucky then that these cheese waffles take almost no time to make.
Easy homemade granola
I could never understand granola. Having first tried it ages ago, it felt dry, boring and was obviously out of a bag. After such a failed experience, I had no interest in pursuing it for years. It’s definitely not something I would ever consider ordering for breakfast. And I certainly never slowed down next to granola shelves while grocery shopping. For the sake of full disclosure, I still do neither of those things. But after a pure chance of luck where some fancy homemade granola was part of a breakfast package at a place we used to frequent, my opinion of it changed. So I now make it quite regularly at home. Fortunately, the recipe is extremely straight-forward and very interchangeable in terms of ingredients.