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Appropriate times for breakfast.

You know that warm feeling of a fresh start you get when that swell plate of hot breakfast sits in front of you? And right beside it, the glorious fresh-squeezed orange juice, steaming coffee or stimulating herbal tea. What’s the best time to reboot your day with a cheerful breakfast? We offer this list of great breakfast moments to get your mood back on track.

5 A.M. Breakfast ahead of the curve.

7 A.M. The classic early breakfast.

9 A.M. A civilized start.

10 A.M. The mid-morning booster.

12 noon. Breakfast makes for a great lunch.

2 P.M. Breakfast pick-me up.

4 P.M. The early dinner breakfast special.

6 P.M. Five-course breakfast.

8 P.M. The dessert breakfast.

10 P.M. European elegance by late breakfasting.

Midnight. Breakfast with the night owls.

2 A.M. After hours breakfast with rock stars and truckers.

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Curry for breakfast? Why not!

In America, we’ve been socialized to believe that a “hearty breakfast” consists of eggs, flapjacks, cereal, juice, and the like.

Yet according to food historians, the concept of breakfast food didn’t exist in the U.S. until the mid-1800s. Before that, breakfast was a meal of leftovers, like cheese and bread. If you had a few bucks in the bank, you added meat and fish to your morning plate.

Then the families of Post and Kellogg toasted some grains, and later an egg lobbyist convinced Congress to put scrambled, fried and hard boiled at the top of their food pyramid. You could keep this American breakfast routine going. But why be trapped in the usual food patterns? Could there be a more exciting way to “break fast” that’s just even better than what’s on the menu at your local coffee shop?

One suggestion is adding some inner heat to your morning meal. It’s a sure-fire way to wake up, since hot spices release endorphins in your system, similar to a runner’s high.

While we’re deviating from local custom, why not tour more of the world when it comes to your a.m. cuisine?

In Pakistan, it’s Siri Paya in the a.m., a soup made from slowly cooking the head and feet of a cow, a lamb, or a goat, then adding tomatoes, onions, and spices.

Mexicans like huitlacoche with their eggs. Technically speaking, this is diseased corn, sporting a fungus that’s considered a delicacy in Mexico. The spores that infect the corn turn it black and give it a mushroom-like flavor.

And in Pennsylvania Dutch country (near where the first SuperOptimists were born), scrapple (leftover scraps from the pig, like the eyeballs, tail and snout) are ground into a patty and fried, much to the horror of those thinking sausage is the worst thing that can be done with a sow’s innards.

Hopefully these suggestions have whetted your appetite to try something new. But even if you decide to stick with a bowl of Cheerios, whatever you do, don’t skip breakfast. Harvard School of Public Health researchers found that men who did had a 27% higher risk of heart attack or death from heart disease.*

So here’s to having your cake and eating it for breakfast too, if you so choose.

*The researchers think that the no-breakfast brigade makes up for skipping the morning meal by stuffing themselves at night. This is neither good for their slumber, nor their metabolic rate.

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Pie for breakfast?

No one knows how much time they have on earth. We act as if we must take care of ourselves so we can live to be 100. But how many of us make it to that age? And do you really want to?

Maybe it’s time to wake up and reshuffle the deck. Starting with a piece of blueberry pie for breakfast. It’s not as deviant as you may think. Pie’s a pastry, after all. It’s meant for breakfast since it goes great with coffee. Plus wth breakfast pie, you have all day to burn off the calories. And what goes better with pie than ice cream? Add a dollop of vanilla with your pie; it’s no different than putting cream in your coffee.

“The pie is an English institution, which, planted on American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species. Not merely the old mince pie, but a thousand strictly American seedlings from that main stock, evinced the power of American housewives to adapt old institutions to new uses.” – Harriet Beecher Stowe 1869 novel “Oldtown Folks.”

Pie became so strongly identified with America by the 19th century that writers and journalists from both near and far declared Americans to be suffering a kind of pie madness. New Englanders, who were particularly prone to pie-eating, made good fodder for satire and good targets for scolding by increasingly health-conscious cookbook writers. As more Americans traveled abroad and became acquainted with European food culture, it became fashionable to condemn pie as food for the “rustic.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson found pie to be just such a pleasing medium, as his friend James Thayer recalled, describing a breakfast taken with Emerson and friends in the 1870s. Pie, Thayer reported, “at breakfast was one of Mr. Emerson’s weaknesses.” Emerson offered slices to his fellow diners, who one by one declined, prompting him to protest in humor, “but … what is pie for?”

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