Some Summer Breakfasts

Are you ready for July? The waaay-too-hot month is still just "Early Summer" according to The Political Palate (The Bloodroot Collective (Betsey Beaven, Noel Giordano, Selma Miriam, and Pat Shea), 1980), and I've already given some early summer recipes, so this time I'm shaking things up a little. Beyond the eight seasonal recipe sections, the book also offers a breakfast chapter and a bread chapter. I'll save the breads chapter for a cooler month (when baking might sound more appealing) and focus on breakfasts today.

Most of the breakfast chapter is dedicated to omelets. Here's the basic recipe.

It's interesting that while most cookbooks recommend a splash of milk or cream in the eggs as they're getting mixed, this book recommends a dash of Tabasco and a tablespoon of beer to add "flavor and lightness."

This is a health-food-adjacent book, so I wasn't surprised when an ingredient I've never particularly associated with omelets is claimed as an ingredient in the restaurant's best-selling version.

Of course it has alfalfa sprouts in it. I always thought of them as simply the largely flavorless stringy topping that comes standard on pretty much all health-food-restaurant sandwiches. I guess they got thrown into omelets too.

There's also an old-fashioned sounding "use up the leftovers" omelet that seems like it could come from a thrifty 1940s cookbook.

Honestly, I am a fiend for homemade bread, so an omelet full of homemade bread cubes sounds lovely to me (though I'd go with fresh parsley and/or sage for the herbs).

The book also offers a granola recipe (as was required by law for any health-food-ish cookbook from the era). More interesting is the overly-complicated pancake recipe.

Of course health food aficionados want sourdough (or sour dough) pancakes! Part of the point of quick breads like pancakes is that they're... well... quick! And here is a recipe that requires creating a starter (if you don't already have one) and tending it long-term if you do. It just seems a bit counter-intuitive to me, though I imagine it's a fun way to use the starter if you've got it anyway and need to use some occasionally before it takes over the entire neighborhood.

I, however, will continue to feel just a little bit overly proud of myself whenever I manage to make "homemade" pancakes from a just-add-water mix. That's good for July, in any case, when too much extra effort can lead to a melt-down. We'll check in on Bloodroot again in late summer....