Breakfast; the first meal after an extended, sleeping fast. It’s the first log you toss on the embers of last night’s fire. It needs be robust and hearty; something that will fuel you through the day. Energy that will keep your brain and body firing.

If you’re like me, you’ve experienced more than a few mornings fueled by coffee and coffee alone. It seems like a good idea at first. Save time! Yay. But these mornings tend to be grumpy, highly-reactionary, frustrating mornings. The caffeine is revving up your metabolism, but you’ve got nothing in the tank to feed the burn. So your body starts losing it’s mind; it get’s into fight or flight mode. Your cortisol is going out of  control as you bite off your co-workers heads, temporarily blinded by hunger, not knowing or understanding the beast underneath just needs some fuel.

Self-reflection is tough work, so it took me a while to figure out what was going on on these coffee-only mornings. I just needed a good breakfast! Something easy to put together. Something well-rounded and delicious. Something that wasn’t expensive, but complied with most of my semi-Paleo, dietary rules.

I came up with the Breakfast Bowl.

The loose formula looks like: previously baked-Potato + Butter + Protein + Vegetables, and it’s a snap to put together in the morning:

1. I bake 5-10 potatoes once or twice a week, and store in the fridge. This storage does some interesting things to the starch, creating a prebiotic called resistant starch that acts a lot like a fiber; this is a good thing. Fuel for those microbes in the gut. Read about it here.
2. I toss a thick pad of butter in a pan, and then smash a cold baked potato in the pan to simmer with the butter
3. I toss in a protein; usually grass-fed beef, mussels, egg, shrimp, or a combination of all of these. I intentionally avoid chicken and pork. I’m interested in saturated fats, cholesterol and DHA along with the protein. Chicken and Pork tend to make my feel funky later in the day; my thinking is that the typically grain-forward diets of the chicken and pork result in far too many Omega-6 fatty acids in the fat tissues, which respond poorly to the heat in the pan, create inflammation in the brain, and also create cell-permeability issues in the cell membranes, exacerbating blood sugar issues. I’m out on a limb here but this is a well-researched limb.
4. I generously add salt, freshly-ground black pepper, cayenne pepper, oregano, and honey to sweeten things up for the morning palette. I may add additional fresh herbs if I have them around.
5. I’ll toss the whole mess in a bowl and garnish with green onions or kimchi if I have any around.

This is the general formula and I’ll adjust it for whatever meat or vegetables are sitting in the fridge. I may add sautéed leeks, or different dried herbs, or mushrooms… there are all sorts of possibilities here.

Let me know what you think! What do you like to eat for breakfast?