Thursday, January 5, 2012

Breakfast of Champions

I always struggle with breakfast. I like to eat traditional breakfast foods but if I eat them as soon as I wake up it makes me sick. Actually anything heavy in the first few hours after waking up makes me sick. I also wake up HUNGRY so it's a problem.

I have to make something FAST because the kids and I tend to wake up around the same time and they, like their mother, wake up hungry. In our house we tend to have first and second breakfast. First breakfast is a bowl of cereal. Or a cheese stick and a piece of toast. Plus a drink. Something small and easy. Second breakfast is either grand (home made biscuits and ham and eggs and grits!) or turns into snack if we've gotta run out of the house and lunch turns into the big meal.

One thing my kids love though is smoothies.


When we downsized I didn't get another blended. It *can* be done in a food processor. The ice doesn't incorporate as well but that doesn't bother us. I like when the ice can't come up the straw and give me brain freeze and so far no comments from the kiddos. Our standby smoothie is this one:


Peanut butter, banana, soymilk and ice. Real hard recipe. Although a quick note: The best bananas for smoothies are scary looking. And then freeze them. (I can't remember who gave me this tip!) Even better is if you take the time to slice them, bag them and then freeze them. I'm lazy though so I tend to freeze them whole and then defrost them a little and put them in the smoothie. They get sweeter as they ripen.

If anyone else has any quick easy smoothie ideas (that taste good with soy milk) leave me a comment! I have to keep them simple otherwise I'll mess them up in my half awake first breakfast state of mind.

Also last night we got a GREAT package.


Winter coats for all of us!!!! Woot! I ordered Fi a women's small (women's sizes!? Nooooo she's getting so big!!!!!) and G a size or two too big because these are nice coats and I want them to wear them forever. Fi's comes down nearly to the top of her boots but when she's outside she likes to sit and play. Maybe run a little... but most of it is passive. G on the other hand got a coat with sleeves that have thumb holes so when you put your gloves on there's absolutely no wrist gaping. And it has "a guinea pig of fur!" around the hood according to him. I even got a knee length coat and D got a low hip length (they had tall! yay!) so that we can drive a little easier. Now we're ready for the snow. The wool coats I've worn for years didn't do much in high wind and D didn't actually have a coat. 

Now we're ready for the beautiful outdoors. Maybe we'll even go play on the swing set. After second breakfast of course.



3 comments:

Rob Dake said...

The interns here make smoothies all the time, or they did until they broke the blender and I won't get another one. They always made a mess and never cleaned it up (and by a mess I mean it looked like they put a hand grenade in some yogurt and tossed it onto the counter).

Frozen raspberries, blue berries, well just berries, some kind of yogurt (they preferred the expensive greek yogurt), and some kind of nut.

I bet none of this helps you though does it.

Oh and my spambot filter word is "tripe" I bet that would make an awful smoothie.

Unknown said...

Ya know it does actually. I'm on the lookout for a good berry recipe but they always seem a little bitter to me. I think maybe cause I don't use yogurt with G just yet. He can handle it in small amounts but I make smoothies he takes it in like it's made of chocolate. So maybe the yogurt is what sweetens it up just a bit.

And I swear blenders are just messy. The one we had tried desperately to coat our kitchen in mess. Even when it'd stop sometimes an air bubble or two would be trapped around the blades and just as I opened it it'd burp and throw smoothie everywhere. Blegh.

Niquie said...

i make berry smoothies with oj instead of yogurt. i'm not a huge dairy fan, so I usually just use frozen berries, some OJ, and a little water generally to thin it out. Sometimes I add mango if I feel like I need something else.