Breakfast.

I, like most other people my age, grew up with the constant "breakfast is the most important meal of the day"... and like most people, I more or less ignored that advice. 

Can you blame me for valuing what precious little sleep I get over spending time cooking in the mornings? Most days as a teenager I'd be content to just grab a piece of fruit on my way out the door... or absurd amounts of coffee once I got to HUB at the U of A, occasionally with a scone for a bit of substance (so THAT's how I dropped fifteen pounds when I was at the U. I miss that body.) And to be totally honest, I'm still not 100% sold on breakfast, and will in all likelihood probably be living off of caffeine when I'm back in school at the end of August. 

But over the past few weeks, I've been making more of a conscious effort to force myself to eat in the mornings, whether I want to or not. Some days it's a losing battle, but some days (like today) I completely rock it. 

Any of my Card cousins who read this will laugh and nod knowingly, but... Well, Grandma and Aunt Marge and the aunties all had it right with the "make sure you have some protein!!"... I've found that the mornings where I have eggs for breakfast tend to be the days where I'm less in need of snacking during the day. Let's take today's breakfast for example! 

My grandma is actually the one who
introduced me to Peabutter, but I was
pleasantly surprised to find that Rory
eats it as well!

I've come to start with a basic framework (eggs and toast) and occasionally spice it up a little bit. 

Today, I put some NoNuts Golden Peabutter on my toast.Yep, I'm one of those poor unfortunate souls with a nut allergy. It hasn't really ever affected me much (aside from last December, when I had an allergic reaction and landed myself in the hospital in anaphylactic shock and the mother of all asthma attacks... That was minorly terrifying...), although it definitely has limited some of my food choices, especially since all the nuts that are really good for you are the ones that would kill me in a matter of minutes.

A lot of the nut-free peanut butter substitutes out there are heavily soy based, which is something that I do my best to avoid because I consider soy to be something best avoided.

I also have a sunflower seed butter at home but have found it to be much more oily than I'd like (plus it's horrifyingly expensive), so I generally stick with NoNuts Golden Peabutter when I want something atop my toast.

This peabutter is made with golden chickpeas and is actually manufactured relatively locally-- in Legal, AB -- and is very delicious. According to Rory (who does buy peanut butter but eats it only when he won't be smooching me in the near future, and seldomly when I'm actually around him at all because the smell makes me nauseated), NoNuts is a fair bit more sticky in texture than actual peanut butter but it's still quite good and very worth it. We've bought it at Safeway and Walmart.

So while I nommed my peabutter-and-toast (which I only finished half of), I took to my frying pan and made my daily scrambled eggs (protein!). Today, I decided to spice them up a bit, with dried chives and some dehydrated onion. I would've chopped fresh onion and harvested some chives from my balcony, but I had all of about ten minutes to cook and eat breakfast before I had to leave for work (I've been valuing my sleep much more than usual lately).

Contrary to the deceptive picture to the left, I didn't omelet-ify my eggs. I'm just... not very good at making omelets, and they're more of a Saturday morning breakfast for me anyways.

These delicious eggs (with just a wee pinch of salt and pepper) got topped with a tablespoon of salsa. So good. I wish that the picture of the finished eggs hadn't turned out so blurry, ha. That's what I get for iPhone pictures, I suppose.


But yes. Breakfast.

As much as I'd rather not eat first thing in the morning, when I *do* eat I'm less prone to snacking on awful things during the day. It's a good thing, I suppose.