I used to work nights. You can draw that card at a newspaper, same as you might in a hospital or police station, in a factory or a financial house doing business in markets that hum while the rest of America sleeps. I did not cook dinner much then. Night work makes cooking dinner more than a chore. Often, it makes it impossible.
I felt bad about that. I had little kids. I knew that eating with them regularly was important. Everyone knows that, or says they do: your spouse, your aunt, the pediatrician, Michelle Obama.
So I made breakfast. They call a night shift at a newspaper the lobster shift, for reasons much debated but never solved. Mine was close to literal: I was the restaurant critic at The New York Times. I ate my lobsters at night, away from my family. I came home late and filed my notes and slept briefly, then woke to palm aspirin and feed everyone breakfast as if it were a weeknight dinner in a fantasy suburbia, everyone smiling, steam rising off the plates. So Dad wears sunglasses in the kitchen, so what?
It was great. It is still great: a family meal, five, six, seven days a week, served in the morning, when all is possibility. Cooking dinner can be stressful whatever your hours. It is hard to do as often as you like.
Try cooking breakfast instead.
For one thing, it is easier than making dinner. (No big hunks of protein. No side dishes. No salad. No dessert!) It is generally cheaper, too, for much the same reason, although if you do it right, it can feel like a luxury and taste like one, too.
Let us stipulate: No one has time to cook breakfast. There are buses and trains to catch, cars to get started, errands to run before the boss starts checking her watch and everything gets tense. Someone needs to go to the gym before work or run a few miles, get the dry cleaning, walk the dog. Maybe you got in at midnight after the flight from Chicago was delayed because of snow that never came. You’re tired.
Cooking breakfast is a hassle many of us don’t want to face. That’s why there’s a drive-through lane at the doughnut shop.
Do it anyway. Wake up 15 minutes before you usually do and see how easily the sacrifice play can lead to a win: a pile of buttered toast with jam; bowls of yogurt adorned with granola and fresh-cut fruit; some quick pancakes with maple syrup, nuts and dried fruit; a skillet of soft scrambled eggs. You won’t be alone. The NPD group, a retail tracking firm that follows the breakfast game, estimates that sales of raw or fresh breakfast ingredients will be up 9 percent by 2018.
For students, especially, the data is clear: Eating a healthy breakfast leads to improved cognition and memory, helps reduce absenteeism and generally improves mood. A 2008 study in the journal Pediatrics found that teenagers who ate breakfast regularly had a lower body-mass index than those who did not.
Similar research on adults has been less clear. But the logic about mood holds true for all: Eat breakfast and you’ll have a better morning. Perhaps you’ll eat less at lunch. You’ll have a better afternoon. Which leads to a better evening and better sleep. And a better breakfast the following morning.
So: Whole-grain muffins. Orange slices. A sausage or two. Everyone wins.
Drink your coffee while the radio plays softly and others sleep, cook a little, then call everyone out for the meal. (You can wash the pan in the evening, recalling the morning’s joy.) Cooking breakfast is easier the third time you do it than it will be the first, but it will always be welcome and will always be worth the time.
You can spend that time in advance or in the moment. You can prepare the meal the night before, right before bed: Steel-cut oats placed in a rice cooker overnight yield a breakfast porridge out of 19th-century Ireland, silky and hot, fuel for a morning’s labor. You can assemble the makings for French toast and dip the bread in the morning, or tear it into chunks and make a casserole to chill overnight and roast through at the break of dawn. Stir up some yeasted waffle batter after dinner, and by morning you are good to go.
But you just made dinner, you say: Enough with the work! That’s fine. Wait until morning, then make something on the fly: whirred fruit and orange juice and yogurt for a smoothie to accompany a simple fried egg, for instance. That’s a 10-minute job. Or make like a Californian and spread avocado over toast. Five minutes! Sprinkle some salt on it, and you may as well be eating on Malibu Pier.
Do you like peanut butter for breakfast, spread on an English muffin? Or apples fried in bacon fat? Last night’s rice heated through with butter and soy sauce? A fruit salad? A toasted bagel with a slice of ham, a slice of Swiss?
It is all good cooking, if you serve it with care. And it gets better, easier, even more delicious, every time you do.
Start making breakfast every day. Make breakfast all the rage.
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