Breakfast Project: Day One

Breakfast with Sammy, Breakfast Project

Day One: "Nana Fern"

I have a confession to make: I am not a morning person. I used to be a morning person... early to bed, early to rise and all that. When Michael and I first started dating, I was fast asleep by 11:30pm. I have always required eight hours of sleep to remain healthy, so whatever the bed time, I got my eight hours. It seems now that I am old, I can no longer get to sleep before 1:00am, sometimes I am up well past 2:00am. This makes getting eight hours of sleep and starting work before 9 or 10am very difficult. Not that you care about my sleep patterns, but I do have a point to all this and I will get to it, eventually. I promise.

A couple years ago I wrote about Joey's "senioritis." There just comes a point when they are ready to be done with high school. Sammy is currently a senior and I would be lying if I said it has not been a very difficult school year thus far. If anyone (anyone: a.k.a. younger siblings) ever wants to talk with someone about how kids, especially teens, will take your parental expectations, throw them on the floor and have a full out tantrum on them before handing them back to you as a mess of broken parental expectations, I am your gal. This is all very metaphoric, of course. Kids can't really stomp on a parent's dreams and expectations, can they? :). I'm here to say, for me personally, this was the toughest lesson to learn. Please don't saddle your kids with unrealistic expectations. Life is hard enough without them. The result is heart breaking for everyone. But I DIGRESS!!! For the purpose of this post, we are going to focus on the difficulty Sammy has had getting to school on time. We have been Sammy's human alarm clocks for a while now. It seems his alarms just never work properly... Michael mostly gets the burden since he requires much less sleep than I do and gets up much earlier than I do. Recently, Michael has also been driving Sammy to and from school. We could say this is part of a grounding situation for Sammy or a family car situation--three people, two cars, but again, not the time or place for that here. This week Michael is in Japan. I decided to give Sammy back some freedom by letting him drive to and from school this week. As far as getting him up in the morning, I have committed to getting up every day at 6:30am and making him breakfast to be served at approx. 7:00am so that he can leave by 7:30am (this all feels so deja vu) and THAT is the reason for the post. I am chronicling my morning breakfasts with Sammy and sharing them here on my blog.

Apparently, the sun has not risen by 6:30am here in Portland. Wow does that make it hard to get up :). I know I sound kind of whiny to most people who get up this early, or earlier every morning. My iPhone came in very handy this morning. I used it as an alarm (apparently Sammy's iPhone does not work well in that capacity). Then I used it as a camera for the first day of my "Breakfast With Sammy" project. Since I was using my iPhone, of course I used my new best friend: INSTAGRAM!!!

As the sun rose over the cascades this morning, I noticed it hit the chandelier in a very pretty way. I like to stop and look around at the pretty things when I am up at 6:30am.

Each breakfast this week will have a theme. Today's "Breakfast with Sammy Project" breakfast is titled:

"Nana Fern" because one of the things I remember vividly about visiting my salmon-fishing Grandparents in Tillamook is Nana Fern's Pan-Fried Salmon Fillets and Blueberry Pancakes.

My breakfast preparations began with Joey's "from scratch" pancake recipe. It is tried and true and here it is:

Joey's "From Scratch" Pancake Recipe

1 1/2 cups flour

3 1/2 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

(Sift these dry ingredients together then add the following)

1 Tbsp. white sugar

1 1/4 cups milk (I only had 1% this morning, so I added half buttermilk, half 1%)

1 egg

3 Tbsp. butter, melted

Mix the batter just until blended. Do not over blend or they will be tough pancakes. The batter is pretty thick, I usually end up adding a little extra milk, but Joey likes them super thick. I find them harder to cook when the batter is thick... Joey likes dark pancakes, I do not.

In order for the pancakes to be Nana Fern-like, I added fresh blueberries.

I purchased some lovely fresh caught Canadian Atlantic salmon last night at the grocery store. I added salt and pepper to flour and dredged the salmon fillets in the flour. I then pan fried them in a little oil. They weren't very thick and in order to get a nice color on them, I had the heat on med-high. It only took a couple minutes per side. I then removed them from the heat and covered them with foil to keep them warm. We prefer salmon cooked to medium here in our house, these were actually cooked through but still extremely moist and flavorful.

The finished product was delightfully delicious, just like Nana's always was.

One of the best things about eating breakfast at 7:00am at our house, the view:

And Sammy managed to leave the house on time this morning, even though he had no first period class. Success!