Breakfast is a touchy subject in my house. My sister and her husband (who are both professional chefs by training) and their soon-to-be-three kids live with us ("us" being me, my husband, and our five kids) and Keri and I have very different ideas on what makes an acceptable morning meal. All I really care about is that my kids head off to school with something in their bellies that will last until lunch, so I'm okay with enriched bars, graham crackers with peanut butter, and any number of things. Keri basically thinks breakfast, whenever possible, should be a sit-down affair featuring homemade pancakes or waffles, eggs, etc. You can read about our Breakfast Bar Wars here and here.
Although I still believe I'm right, Keri pretty much won, because hey, if her husband is willing to come down to the kitchen at 7:15 to make buttermilk pancakes, who am to tell my kids not to eat them? So it was more a moral victory than anything else when I found out famous foodie Danielle Altshuler Wiley - aka Foodmomiac - basically agrees with me.
Frankly, Danielle has even lower standards than I do (Cinnamon Toast Crunch? We buy our sugar cereals from the organic section, thank you very much). She attributes this to a couple of factors: one, she never cared for breakfast as a child, and resented being forced to eat it; two, she's too busy in the mornings to break out her skillet and to clean it up afterwards; and three, she invests a lot of time and energy in creating delicious, well-balanced lunches and dinners for her family, and she thinks that's sufficient.
So, where do you stand? Is a sit-down breakfast a wholesome ideal to which we should all aspire, or is my sister's desire to turn every meal into a huge production destined to nurture in our kids an unhealthy obsession with food?
