As the school year starts, the dos and don’ts of breakfasting rear their various annoying heads. Until recently, word on the street has been that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. In some small alleys that’s still the gospel being whispered, but the general thinking is changing.
It’s common sense that grown-ups who indulge too heartily in late-night dinners, laced with pudding and booze, are doing themselves a favour if they delay shoving more down the pie-hole. This has become quite the fashionable thing lately, with its own special name of course — intermittent fasting.
When you look at the usual crud that’s being skipped, then leaving breakfast out of the picture seems a good plan, though this mostly applies to grown-ups and to all of us privileged enough to choose what we’ll eat for breakfast, and whether we should have it at all.
For children starting a school day on an empty stomach — a horrible reality for many small people in our country — even the most cardboardy cereal bobbing in milk would be a lifesaver.
In an ideal world, breakfast for the still-growing would go like this: all children would have the option of breakfast, no child would be forced to finish it, and the breakfast in question would be bolstering and nutrient-rich.
That breakfast then, on most days (unless allergies dictate otherwise) would surely be an egg. While I abhor the notion of superfoods, a fowl’s egg certainly deserves the title. Eggs are loaded with all nine essential amino acids, propvol with vitamins including folate (B9), great fats, choline, calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron, selenium, zinc ... the list could go on. And even if you choose the free-est-ranging eggs available, the nutrient value to price is fantastic.
For those who can’t abide eggs I’ll suggest the breakfast of my own children: leftover chicken curry with a dollop of yoghurt. Also not appealing? Then your offspring can get a sprinkling of the benefits — though for more cash — with a bowl of avocado, nuts and quinoa.
Best breakfast eggs in town? Always at Pablo Eggs-Go-Bar, Fourth Avenue, Melville. I have yet to find something to beat the green shakshuka. It opens at 6.30am, so if you’re more organised than our ridiculous household, you can get there before school starts.
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