breakfast blogger

Ya know what I love? A big hot bowl of cream of wheat with LOTS of lumps in it.

Ya know what I DON”T Love? Having to scrub the lumpy cream of wheat pot after.

*burp*

I headed over to Ottawa last weekend in search of a new place and lucked out!

That’s right… BLUEBERRY BACON PANCAKES. They were awesome. I had a problem with my camera, so sadly I don’t have any good pictures of the pancakes themselves :-(

$8.95 coffee extra. map.

If anyone has noticed my silence lately, I will blame it squarely on a serious illness followed by a destination recovery. During my illness, which stumped my GP after three visits over a period of two weeks and landed me in the hospital, I ate no breakfast. I recovered in the nick of time, as the lady and I had planned a vacation to Florida long ago. It would have been a shame to miss it.

If there was ever a time to go south, this was it. This has been the snowiest winter I can remember since the mid-70s. I can distinctly see in my minds’ eye several school closings and even one or two snow storms that dropped so much snow on the city that my dad’s car was completely buried under a mountain of snow and he couldn’t go to work.

We arrived in Hallandale with a few St.Viateur bagels, took a swim in the ocean, and then made breakfast. I wholeheartedly dislike “Florida bagels” - if a bagel from the Sage Deli is considered an average specimen of a “Florida bagel”. The only bagels I have eaten in Florida (not counting smuggled Montreal bagels) were from the Sage Deli, and I will assume - from its reputation as a Jewish deli - that a Sage bagel is probably superior to most other bagels found in Florida. Still, a Sage Deli bagel is a big, round, stale bun with a dimple in it. When I eat one, my jaw is sore by the time the last bite is making its’ way to my mouth.

I am trying to design the brunch menu for an upcoming event we are having, so I made this:

First I toasted the bagels, which were from the day before. If they were fresh, I would have skipped the toasting. Then I dropped them into a frying pan coated (generously) with butter. I cracked eggs into the holes and waited a bit to get them started. I flipped them and threw on some smoked salmon, hand-cut at the Sage Deli.

I garnished with fresh dill and cherry tomatoes that were from Josh’s Organic Market. We had not really eaten any tomatoes since the fall, so this was a real treat for us, and well worth the sacrifice. Montreal tomatoes in the winter taste like cardboard, and these were like heaven. If you want to read more about Josh’s, check out my Ethicurean post from last year’s trip to Florida, or wait a couple of days for my new post to appear.

We are this beautiful meal on the balcony, overlooking the ocean - here is what we were looking at :

And here’s a shot for you dirty dish fetishists:

Replace bacony with snowy and you’ll get a good idea of what it’s been like around here today.

Pic via Nedroid.com. I’m a big fan of the comics there. I find myself sending the adventures of Beartato and Reginald to my work buddy JFlo now and then.

An another bacony note, here’s a delightfully gloomy comic where bacon is the anti-gloom.

Via Boing Boing Gadgets.