Cowgirls, Pirates, & Eggs

I know. I didn’t post last night. The girls have been going to bed later during the summer, and it’s wreaking havoc on my blog schedule. So I thought that I’d try a morning post for a change of pace.

I’ve had a great morning! Lately J has not been wanting to go to camp, but this morning was smooth as could be. M slept in until I woke her up at an unheard-of 8:30 am (is it those room-darkening curtains?), and I feared that she’d feel rushed and J would be weepy. But no! They happily dressed for special days at their respective camps (J was a cowgirl for Wild West Day, M was a pirate for Halloween in July), even negotiating who would get the red bandana without escalating into High Drama. Then sweet big-sister M walked J to camp, because J’s been acting fine all morning and then losing her nerve as soon as M’s out the door. So I not only avoided drama, I experienced Beautiful Sisterly Love.

In other morning news, I’m a massive creature of habit, and one of them is that I’ve been an obsessive oatmeal eater for years. For a long time I’d eat 1/2 cup of oatmeal made with skim milk, 2 chopped dried apricots, some frozen raspberries, some walnuts, and a tablespoon of my “breakfast blend” of wheat germ, flax seed, and wheat bran. Super-healthy, in theory, but a lot of food. I wake up hungry.  More recently I dropped it down to 1/3 cup and skipped out on the apricots, but I’ve still been thinking that I just have to do more veggies and protein in the morning. Protein because I can really tell when it’s missing, and veggies because who doesn’t need more veggies. But it’s been a struggle to find something appealing.

I think I’m finally having some success. I’m eating one egg, an egg white, a handful of spinach, and whatever random vegetables or beans I have around, and some salsa.

Except, I don’t know, this looked better in person, I think:

Today it was red pepper, a couple of mushrooms, spinach, black beans, and salsa. It’s seriously a massive amount, a heroic amount of vegetables. And it’s not bad. I thought of this partly becauseThe Profussor recently did a post on making eggs in the morning, basically telling readers that it’s easy to make eggs and that they should avoid the microwave. And this was easy, actually. Except that I hate to clean egg pans. Would you believe that I don’t own a cast-iron skillet? I know that you’re shocked. It should probably go on my birthday list (hint, hint, family!). Right now I’m at the stage where I don’t exactly savor my breakfast, but I feel tremendously virtuous and I don’t gag (this is not a joke–there have been some gag-worthy egg white concoctions in my past).  So it’s a step in the right direction, and I’m optimistic about my breakfast future. Although I’m open to suggestions, if anyone has super-healthy breakfast recipes to share.

And best of all, I located some old writing that I’d done for the now-defunct CBS 6 blog. There were a couple of essays that I’d written that had disappeared into the ether, and occasionally I’d pine for them. So I might run a few of them in the near future. I’m hoping that the very few stalwart readers who were actually around and bothering to follow the links back in 2010 will forgive the repetition. . . right? right?