Breakfast for Five

When I was a kid, it was all about Sunday mornings. I would sneak into my brother’s room and hover over him, not waking him up, but wanting to. He always knew it was me and without even opening his eyes would ask, “what’s up Ash.” It was a mixture between annoyance and big brotherly love. I would always reply “Mom’s almost done with breakfast.” He would always tell me to go wake up Michael, our other brother, but I never did. Besides he was always mean and didn’t deserve a breakfast like this.

The aroma of cinnamon from the french toast filled the air, the extra crispy bacon that was going to be devoured lay in the middle, potatoes roasted to perfection sprinkled with green herbs, toast edged with perfectly browned corners situated next to the glass full of bright orange juice, and eggs yellow and fluffy with speckles of pepper announced “come and get it while its hot.” I would look at my Mom in awe and when I look back I am still in awe, how was she able to keep everything so perfect and so warm all by her self? It is a question I ask myself every time I cook. She even had the look in her eyes, “it was nothing.” The thing was… it was something, these Sunday breakfasts’, when everyone was together and everything seemed so perfect, these were the memories. Just as rice is the staple in Japan, Sunday breakfast was the staple in my family.

The funny thing about the mountains of french toast drenched in powdered sugar and sweet maple syrup, crispy bacon next to roasted potatoes, and clouds of eggs and houses of toast is that this memory draws me to a reoccurring theme of the present: “Nothing tastes as good as the past.” Maybe it’s that I know what it takes to make meal now and I am no longer naïve to the hard work. Maybe it’s that everyone is grown up and things have changed. Or maybe just as in article The Breast of Aphrodite, the economic process has left our food altered and changed into ordinariness. Whatever the reason is, the sweet aroma of a homemade Sunday breakfast will always remain to me, a memory of the better days.