Category Archives: Breakfast

Is Morning Time the Best Time?

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My sister told me the most interesting thing this week. She said that she prefers to prepare vegetables (like broccoli, for example) in the morning, when she has more energy, instead of leaving it to late afternoon, when she, along with the rest of her family, is hungry and running on fumes, as an old friend used to put it. She already buys her broccoli in bags of florets, so that part is done. Then she tosses a few handfuls into a steamer set in a pan containing a few inches of water, sprays them with olive oil, shakes on some salt and pepper plus Trader Joe umami seasoning (mushroom powder, onion powder, spices), and keeps layering until the bag is empty or the pot is full. Then she turns on the water to boil, and pretty soon the broccoli is bright green and ready to refrigerate, to be eaten later that day or the next. Single mom, super efficient. Say no more.

This story got me thinking about something else. Continue reading →

Breakfasts That Stick to Your Ribs

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This week I’m going to spend a minute talking about the typical American breakfast, namely toast, bagels, muffins, waffles, pancakes, breakfast cereal, biscuits, and bread, and then I’m going to talk about what else we can eat for breakfast. The typical American basically consists of just white flour and sugar. It’s all stripped carb. I put “cereal” in quotes because the word cereal really means grain (like oatmeal, millet, kasha, bulgur wheat), and not boxes of sweetened, dyed, highly processed products of limited nutritional value. Continue reading →

Plums, Poetry, Public Transit, and William Carlos Williams

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If you look up as you walk through the back door into my kitchen, you will see a poster written in Swedish, a translation of a poem written in 1934 by the great William Carlos Williams. In addition to being a pediatrician, Dr. Williams, from Rutherford, New Jersey, was a great poet. Here is the story of how the poster and poem, below in the original English, ended up in my kitchen. Continue reading →

Toast and Jelly Waste Your Insulin

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You probably already know that diabetes and obesity in the United States have reached epidemic proportions, but you may be surprised to learn that many, if not most, cases of diabetes are preventable. How? The best strategy for preventing diabetes and obesity is to learn how to conserve your body’s insulin supply. Continue reading →

Insulin: A Very Good Place to Start

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Here is why it’s important to use less insulin: The fact is that insulin is not your friend. You need it to live, but you want to use as little as possible. You want the levels of insulin in your bloodstream to stay as low as possible. Like sugar. The lower the better (within reason, say 80 to 99 for fasting blood sugars). When it comes to insulin, you want your levels to remain as low as necessary to do the job, not zero of course, but on the low side. Why is that? There are a number of reasons. Continue reading →

The Origin of “Granola”

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It will probably surprise you to learn that the term granola was coined way back in the 1870s by one Dr. John Kellogg, late of Battle Creek, Michigan, where he ran a famous health sanitarium to which patrons flocked in pursuit of health and wellness. Among his many prescient recommendations was one that should be familiar to you, dear reader — that food be prepared the old-fashioned way, using whole grains instead of stripped ones like white flour or corn syrup. Continue reading →

What’s for Breakfast?

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I really love snow, and last weekend Northeast Ohio finally got its first real snowstorm of the year. As you might guess, I spent a lot of time last weekend shoveling snow, so I needed a breakfast that provided a lot of fuel. That’s what I want to talk about today. Breakfast. So what’s for breakfast? In a word? Protein. In two words? Nourishing fat. In three words? No stripped carbohydrates. I’m going to share some of my favorite ideas for breakfast, but first I’ll tell you about some of the ways I learned to nourish myself when I was younger and traveling. Continue reading →