breakfast blogger

Poor KJ… her computer was suffering from terminal BSOD, or Blue Screen of Death. As you can see on the side here, it was some sort of pagefile problem. After 15 minutes of fiddling around trying to cure it, it began apparent that this wasn’t going to be a simple fix. So off we went for breakfast to mull over our options, KJ’s treat! Woot, this is the best kind of computer call… one that comes with a free breakfast!

KJ took me to the White Horse, not too far from the Ottawa VIA train station at 294 Tremblay Road. I was pretty impressed with the breakfast and they have great prices too!

I had the Rib Steak and 2 Eggs:

And KJ had the Two Eggs with Corn Beef Hash:

mmmmmMMmmm, yummy… Mine was $8.95 and KJ’s was $4.95. Very awesome.

Stay tuned, KJ’s computer is now fixed and I have to return it next weekend. Payment is another free breakfast!

I was checking out a website that sells habitats to keep your chickens in, in case you wanted to have a reliable source of eggs in your own backyard. It apparently comes with the chickens! If I had a house, I’d order this for sure - I’d have the freshest breakfast in the world!!

The site also sells this cool toaster that also cooks your egg!

Gotta get one of these . . . .

What better use for leftover mashed taters than pancakes. Making fried mashed potatoes for breakfast is pretty good too, but I was in the mood for tater cakes this morning.

Once again, my trusty bag of Krusteaz pancakes mix come to the rescue. I added 1 part leftover mashed taters to 1.5 parts Krusteaz pancake mix and added just enough water to make a thick batter.

The potatoes tend to soften up and spread when they cook, so I made the batter a little on the thick side. I also threw in some chives, parsley and paprika for a little interest.

They are also really good plain, or I think they would go well with cheese chunks in them too. MmmmMmm cheese. Everything is better with cheese.

I then added far too much butter to my griddle and slapped on my cakes. I’m usually trying to cut corners on fat and such, but there is just something about tater cakes that screams crispy edges! Take note of the fat bubbling around the edges. Sometimes it must be done! And so it was. And they were golden and crispy and perfect, and they were glad and rejoiced.

Now tater cakes are great on their own, but I’m more of a full meal deal type of person when it comes to breakfast. There happened to be just enough room for a couple strips of turkon on the griddle and a mess of scrambled eggs with cheese. There was even some grape tomaters left on the counter from one of the last pickings I will get form my plants this year too. And so there was breakfast, in all it’s potato pancaked glory.

Just incase you feel that there was one needed, here is an…

EXTREME BREAKFAST CLOSEUP!!!

Burp!

I have no idea why this Comfort Inn location is referred to as the “Taj Mahal”, but I don’t really care - it just seemed to me to be a part of the United States of America’s global appropriation strategy. I was in Vermont for 1 night, with my mom, and we just needed a place to sleep. And then of course have breakfast!

Our stay at the lovely “Taj Mahal” Comfort Inn in in sleepy St. Johnsbury, Vermont included complementary continental breakfast. I was a little confused at the geographical contradictions implied by the hotel, seeing as the wikipedia entry on breakfast, subsection 4.5.1, defines continental breakfast as “an institutional meal plan based on lighter Mediterranean breakfast traditions”. We all know (I hope) that the “Taj Mahal” is in India. A South Asian breakfast would have been pretty cool, but instead we would have to settle for a Mediterranean-themed start to our day. Life could be worse.

Of course, I was in the United States of America, where excess and obesity is the norm (even in Vermont!), so this was a actually more of a breakfast buffet - with no Mediterranean theme in sight. Besides a bowl of slowly rotting apples, which was the almost the only healthy food in the room, there was a dispenser offering unlimited quantities of cereals such as some sort of generic Kaptain Krunch, pictured below:

I passed on the cereal once I saw that there was a Do-It-Yourself waffle machine, which is so highly-regarded by the Comfort Inn people that they have a waffle pictured on the main page of their website. After pumping a generous amount of batter into a cardboard cup from the waffle-batter dispenser,you pour it into the waffle machine, flip it, and start the timer.

Exactly two minutes later you get your waffle - W A F F L E T A S T I C ! !

I shared a waffle with my mom and also had a stale roll with a dimple in the middle, otherwise known outside of Montreal as a bagel.

I had mine with a sliced hard boiled egg. MMMmm….

I was tempted to have 15 or 16 doughnuts for dessert, but I decided to hold off until later.

I really hope Sasha Tseng gives this name to this unique idea:

Via Yanko Design.

I can think of no better way of spending the last long weekend of summer, than at a buddies cabin on Okanagan Lake.

After a full night of mass beer consumption and sleeping in a 1.5 person tent (they say 2 man tent, but they are dirty dirty liars!), there is a certain need for a big full meal deal kind of breakfast. We aren’t much for roughin’ it, so we had our meals planned out in advance and have all the fixin’s at the ready.

EXTREME BREAKFAST CLOSE-UP!!!

We had scrambled eggs with cheese, some toast (with real butter no less!), turkon (that’s turkey bacon to you unknowing breakfast fans out there) and shredded hashbrowns with yet more cheese. We also were munching on honey roasted mixed nuts and plums from our tree at home while we waited for everything to become that masterpiece we called breakfast. We had brought all the things we needed to cook breakfast in our own little self contained slice of the wild (in the back yard of said cabin) so we didn’t need to add to the pure bedlam in the cabins kitchen that happens come breakfast time.

But boiling water for coffee proved too time consuming for our hungover, starving butts and we headed inside to make use of the camping perk. Thankfully they have an old propane run stove we could take advantage of.

Nothing like coffee that could strip paint to dust off our brains from the heavy night of drunkin’ debauchery around the campfire the night previous. The only thing that could make our breaky even better, was the view.

That and the post breakfast bath in the lake. I never knew I could scream so loud under water. Serves me right for not dipping my toe in to check the temperature before jumping head first in abnormally cold lake water.

I blame the beer for the lapse in judgment.

Burrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp!

Yay! The kitchen at the new house is finally set up. I celebrated with fried eggs covered with freshly cracked pepper and a hot Italian sausage.

I missed something for the nose! :-)