When good friends come over we love to entertain with soup. With familiar faces at the table we have no problem slurping away while making conversation. In the winter we prefer hot, substantial soups. These can easily be served with a side of roasted vegetables and sandwich to make a complete meal. The other day I decided to make this soup in order to use up the excessive amount of cheese and beer we seemed to have in our fridge. I still can’t figure out why we had it all, it must have accumulated over the course of a couple of weeks.
As evidenced by the extensive family breakfast recipe list I’ve accumulated we take breakfast very seriously in this house. I got this from my parents, we always ate big breakfastseach morning growing up. My mother, a teacher, rightfully acknowledged that a healthy breakfast is a great way for both children and adults to start the day. I’ve carried on this tradition with my daughter, we eat breakfast together every morning. Of course, just because we consider breakfast a necessity – we all wake up with growling tummies – it doesn’t mean it has to be boring or difficult to make. Here are eight of our favorite hot breakfasts. I make a lot of these after my daughter is asleep. Or, they are classic powernap recipes and come together in a moment’s notice. Here is to wishing you a warm, cozy winter morning full of hot breakfasts!
1. Overnight Slow-Cooker Vanilla Bean & Almond French Toast: This super simple recipes is perfect for feeding a crowd and doesn’t require any baking in the morning. Be a bedtime chef, flip the switch before you go to bed and wake up to a hot breakfast ready to go!
2. Vegetable Pie:This protein packed pie is a gorgeous winter breakfast that can filled up with nearly any kind of vegetable you have on hand. Bake it up for a Sunday brunch and save any leftovers for dinner!
3.Easy Sticky Buns;These quick buns are so much fun to make and are perfect served up cold morning. They can easily be prepped the night before and baked up fresh.
4. Double Egg-n-Bacon Sandwich: This awesome, greasy sandwich is ideal when you need a filling breakfast to power you through a busy morning. The ultimate powernap recipe, it comes together in minutes and gets the day off to a great start.
5. Cinnamon-Blueberry Waffles: Homemade waffles are the key to my daughter’s heart. I always have the dry mix stocked in the pantry so I can whip them up on demand.
6. Cinnamon-Sugar Strawberry Steel Cut Oat Loaf: My current favorite healthy hot breakfast, this hearty loaf cooks overnight and is ready first thing. Cut out a slice each day to warm up and enjoy first thing!
7. Whole Wheat Cranberry Spice Oat Muffins: These healthy muffins are a terrific winter bite, especially since apples are still available in the northeast. We often pack these in our bags if we need breakfast on the go, or for a mid-morning snack.
8. Chocolate Chip Cinnamon Rolls with Vanilla Bean Glaze: These rolls are undeniably decadent which makes them perfect for an occasional winter treat. We find them particularly rewarding on Friday mornings, our little reward for getting through the week!
What’s Going on Today: Typical crazy day at home followed by sledding after school!
Naptime Goals: Meetings and catching up on writing, slow cooker lasagna already simmering away for dinner.
Tonight’s Menu: Lasagna, Salad and Wine. After the kiddo goes to sleep prep breakfast tomorrow!
Until recently my daughter would finish her substantial plate of cinnamon waffles while I was still clutching hot tea and waiting for my oatmeal to cook. I’ve recently remedied this problem by preparing my steel cut oats in the slow-cooker the night before after my daughter was asleep, enabling us to eat breakfast together every morning. Prepping steel cut oats in the slow cooker overnight is an extremely popular winter breakfast, but I hadn’t tried it myself until this month. Once I realized how well the method works I started doing it weekly, piling in the oats after bedtime and digging into my hot cereal alongside my daughter the next morning. The leftovers of each batch were stored in a loaf pan so all week I could cut out a big slice and warm it up in an instant each morning.
Today I am chatting with my friend Georgia Pellegrini about her new book, Girl Hunter: Revolutionizing the Way We Eat, One Hunt at a Time. I read this book in two days flat and loved every second of it. It is all about chef and author Georgia’s personal journey to learn about the origins of her food and ultimately solve her own ominvore’s dilemma. This message resonated with me because where I grew up in Cooperstown, New York many of the families I knew hunted all fall to feed their families all winter. It was not about sport and reckless killing, it was about feeding a family responsibly and inexpensively, as well as respecting the wildlife in the area. Families depended, and still do, on hunting to put food on the table. I am so excited that Georgia is here today to share her story. To win a copy of her book see below!
1. Girl Hunter is about much more than hunting, it is about your coming to terms with your own views on eating meat and preserving wildlife. You say “I’m an omnivore who has solved my dilemma.” Can you elaborate on your hunting and eating mantra?
It is based off of my belief that we are all natural omnivores, regardless of the food choices we make. Our dilemma, which scientist Paul Rozin wrote about in 1976, and which writer Michael Pollan made accessible, is what we should have for dinner when we have so many food choices. The dilemma is even more important today because our industrial food system is so contaminated with corn, and hormones, and sick animals, that we humans are faced with the dilemma of what to eat so as not to get sick. My personal solution is hunting and gathering. When done ethically, this is the last natural and instinctive interplay between humans, the land, and animals. Hunting is an act involving all of the senses and I believe one of the most natural ways of being human on this planet. It is part of the natural cycle of life, humans eat animals and plants, animals eat animals and plants, plants feed from the dirt, and we turn to dirt. I think that is the part people have a hard time with—where there is the flow of life there is also the flow of death, and they have to acknowledge their own mortality.
Last week I noticed my stash of frozen bananas had grown a little too large. I always have at least three in there for emergency banana bread, but during the holidays I didn’t bake any so the pile had grown to nine. We were in need of some fresh snack food so this was perfect timing. Underneath the bananas I also found the last of the pecans I’d use to make Spiced Pecan Snowballs for Christmas. With these two things in hand, and an hour until school let out, I decided to whip up a fresh loaf of banana and top it with a crunchy pecan streusel. I had never topped banana bread with anything before, but there is a first time for everything, right?
I have to finish off the slow cooker challenge with something that the adults will love: slow cooker cocktails. I mean, who doesn’t love a good cocktail in the middle of winter? I know I do. I love to keep hot punches warm in the slow cooker when we entertain, mulled cider and mulled wine work particularly well. Knowing this I decided to winterize one of our favorite summer drinks and have it waiting for dinner guests on evening.
With breakfast and dinner under control I decided to try a new technique with my slow cooker: baking. We were going out of town for a long weekend in Boston and I wanted to pack some sweets to take along with us. I’d already had some success with a batch of Martha Stewart’s slow-cooker brownies and wanted to attempt something else. A simple pound cake seemed like a good place to start. I know they transport well and can be adapted any number of ways. With a jar of nutella on hand I decided to swirl it in to the batter, along with some chocolate chips and give it a whirl.
Don’t forget that today from 12pm – 1pm, we’ll be hosting a live twitter chat along with Food52, The Daily Meal, Fine Cooking, Punchfork, Foodily, OXO Good Grips and more. We’ll be using hash tag #slowcooker. Tune in to talk all things slow cookin’! During the Twitter event and throughout the day we’ll be offering the first giveaway of amazing OXO tools that are essential for slow-cooking valued at over $150!
Next up on my list of Slow Cooker Challenge dishes to try was a grain-based dish. Given my love of baking risotto I had to wonder, could it be slow-cooked? The principal of the dish, rice slowly absorbing moisture and flavors, seemed to lend itself perfectly to the idea. I also thought this might be true of polenta and couscous, but risotto is one of our favorite meals and felt like the right place to start on a busy Monday afternoon. Plus, I had suggested risotto to my husband as he walked out the door that morning and he smiled so wide so I knew my experiment would be right up his alley.
