Food From Your Childhood

Jaci's venture into cooking breakfast made me start thinking about breakfast (always my favorite meal) when I was growing up.

I grew up in a medical family. The interest in health was also fueled by Mother's following of the health tenets of the Seventh-day Adventist church. There were no mixes or prepared foods in our house. Vegetables were fresh or frozen, almost never canned. The food was not spicy, but was tasty, never bland.

Breakfast was hot most every day. If it consisted of cold cereal and milk, the cereal was never sweetened. There were Corn Flakes and Rice Krispies, but never Frosted Flakes. A Pop Tart? Even if they had been invented by that time, they would never have entered my mother's grocery cart.

Pancakes or waffles were made from scratch—the flour sifted, the eggs broken. Bread for toast had always been kneaded by my mother's hands and baked a day or two earlier. It was always wheat, never white. And the milk was always white, never flavored or sweetened. I guess you'd say we were purists.

A favorite breakfast was bananas in orange sauce over toast. Mother would pour some orange juice in a pan, add a little cornstarch dissolved in water, and heat, stirring while it thickened. Then she'd slice bananas once lengthwise and once crosswise and drop them in the thickened orange juice just long enough for them to heat through. She'd toast some bread, pour a tiny bit of warm milk over the toast to soften it a little, then spoon the bananas and orange sauce over it. Yum!

PianoLady wrote the other day to remind me of a breakfast of Mother's that I fixed for her when we were in college and I had my sweet little house behind Daddy's office. I would grease a small oval baking dish with butter, then break several eggs into the dish. Add a little milk or cream and swirl it around, being careful not to break the yolks. Then sprinkle some Corn Flakes over the top and bake until the yolks were hard, maybe 20 minutes. Sounds simple; tastes wonderful.

Those are my memories.

What did your mother fix for your breakfast before school?