Thursday, October 20, 2016

So, what shall we have for breakfast?

What to have for breakfast: that is the question.

I often ate the bright green pistachio (so called) muffins at the coffee shop this summer. At the end of the summer, I had gained 10 lbs and the shop posted the calorie count of all their foods (something that will be required by law in 2017). 
Those muffins had 690 calories each. 
I'd have done as well to eat Snickers bars. Three of them! (250 cal. each)

So, not those then.

I started exercising again about six weeks ago, and as of today, I've lost 4 lbs., which is encouraging, especially considering I didn't exercise all that hard or change anything else (except to stop eating muffins). 
But since my father had a heart attack last week, I figure I should make an effort to change my diet too.

Breakfast is tricky.
I like to go out and work on my laptop, and the coffee shop's "healthy" choices are half a cup of dry oats in a cardboard tub ($3), or a 2-pack of hard-boiled eggs with a shelf life of 21 days (peeled, yet) ($1.99).

I need a strategy.
I decided to make my mother's rice pudding, to take along in the morning. 
This baked rice pudding is like egg custard thick with rice–– you can almost pick up a piece, not like the creamy stove-top kind.

Baked Rice Pudding

1 cup uncooked rice
3 cups milk
½  teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons butter
½ cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
½ cup currants
4 eggs, beaten
cinnamon

Boil rice in milk and salt until done, about 45 min.
Add everything else but eggs---slowly stir in the beaten eggs last. Pour into a buttered baking dish.

Bake at 325º for 30 minutes. Stir and sprinkle nutmeg on top.
Bake another 30 min.
____________________
My adjustments: 
I use brown rice, cut the sugar in half (1/4 cup = slightly sweet), skip the butter, swap out vanilla for fresh grated ginger.

I was going to take a photo of my rice pudding, but it's not a photogenic food, so here's an illustration by E. H. Shepard for A.A. Milne's poem Rice Pudding instead. (When I was a kid, the flying shoe fascinated me.)

Mary Jane is refusing to eat her rice pudding. 
"What is the matter with Mary Jane?" the poem asks repeatedly.
She won't be consoled, and the poet never discovers (or never reveals) why she is behaving this way. 


Still reading Solomons' Far from the Tree, I fear the onset of some neurological disorder... But probably she's just tired of "rice pudding again."

1 comment:

bink said...

And how's it going on the rice pudding? Are you liking it for b-fast?