Dream breakfasts

Nutritionists tell us breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Strangely though, if you want to bake a cake or persuade a small child to eat an aubergine, you're spoilt for choice when it comes to blogs, but if you want to find out about the perfect bacon butty or what a kedgeree is supposed to look like, information is thinner on the ground. That's where I'd like The Breakfast Club to come in. 

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I have all sorts of ideas for the blog, but to start with I thought I'd ask my family for their dream breakfast. I have two boys, aged 5 and 6, and my partner. He tells me his dream breakfast would be 'coffee, and pancakes with bacon and maple syrup'. This is a little odd, since a. he isn't American and b. in all the years I've known him, I've never once seen him eat his dream breakfast. But there you go; perhaps he's saving himself for that road trip across the States we haven't quite got around to doing yet.

My firstborn has bigger plans for his dream breakfast: 'blueberry pancakes with maple syrup and cream, toast with peanut butter and jam on one slice and nutella on the other, and a bowl of porridge'. This is basically his three favourite breakfasts rolled into one enormous blow-out. I like its transatlantic sweep.

The smallest member of our family came up with perhaps the most idiosyncratic choice: 'chocolate swiss roll, toast with crystal honey on one piece and home-made marmalade on the other, two sausages, pancakes (no blueberries), one hard sweet, and some juice'. This may require a little translation. 'Crystal honey' means that pale, gritty thick honey, and 'hard sweets' are Jolly Ranchers, a bowl of which happened to be sitting on the table at the time of our conversation. They are an American brand of artificially flavoured boiled sweet, beloved of small children, the kind that dyes your tongue the same alarming shade as the sweet, and decidedly not what most people would demand for breakfast. He had just eaten a piece of chocolate swiss roll as well, by the way. I don't, as a rule, serve it up for breakfast.

And for me? I'm not sure. Some days I can't think of anything lovelier than a couple of slices of perfectly toasted bread with butter and marmite, and other days a chilled salad of pink grapefruit, lychees and grapes would hit the spot, perhaps with a dollop of thick, creamy Greek yogurt. Sometimes a bacon sarnie, and on a day of conscientious health watching, perhaps a slice of that ever-so-thin German rye bread with a scraping of butter and honey and a sliced banana on top. But always, always, tea. Strong Assam tea, dash of milk, no sugar.

Looking at the results of my miniscule survey, a couple of things strike me. First of all, we aren't the healthiest family in the UK. I am, however, gladdened that neither of my children made  any mention of sugary breakfast cereals. In our family, pancakes, our weekend breakfast of choice, come out on top, so my next post will start there, with pancakes.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear what your dream breakfast is. Especially if it's chocolate swiss roll.