(10 seconds each to read and are almost that quick to prepare)
By Lisa Messinger
Food and Cooking at Creators Syndicate
Having trouble deciding whether to give your mom breakfast, brunch, dinner or dessert for Mother's Day? When you step into the kitchen to prepare that scrumptious homemade feast, take the heat off of yourself by presenting Mom with a memorable combination of multiple meals.
This means exceptional egg ideas may pop up among dinner ingredients and breakfast specialties as part of dessert.
Not only will this probably trump anything anyone in your family could imagine, but it also could possibly even outshine most meals you might have treated Mom to in a restaurant, had you gone that route.
Another plus: Since breakfast ingredients are often among the least expensive of any meal, using them to pepper everything from dinner to desserts can both make sense and save cents.
Here are a few ideas to give you some inspiration. Experiment by combining flavors to match your own taste – as well as the possibly picky palates of Mom and any other relatives who may be joining you:
- Globetrotting Cooking Channel series star Jeffrey Saad suggests an Asian-inspired touch that combines breakfast and dinner favorites that could have Mom raving right through next year. The author of “Jeffrey Saad's Global Kitchen,” created a super-spiced (sweet and spicy) hoisin-glazed steak served alongside fried eggs with yolks still runny enough to further sauce the meat. Further savings accrue since smaller steaks can be served alongside the filling eggs.
- Award-winning London and New York City chef April Bloomfield, who penned “A Girl and Her Pig: Recipes and Stories,” has a similar adventurousness when it comes to mixing up meals for Mother's Day brunch. Follow her famous lead and serve not only bacon but also pancakes that either have dried chilies (she often uses pequin chilies) or red pepper flakes baked right into the batter or sprinkled on top of the stack. Be sure, as experts advise, to wear latex gloves and not touch your eyes if handling fresh chilies.
- Haley Fox and Lauren Fox, the sisters who helm the famous Alice’s Tea Cup in New York City and wrote a cookbook by the same name, note: Breakfast? Dessert? Who cares about labels when you taste the results? They add diced cheddar cheese and cooked crispy bacon crumbles right into their scone dough.
- In addition, they include French toast in their bread pudding dessert, as well as flavored tea as a small part of the liquid with milk in their pudding.
If you include any of the aforementioned treats in Mom’s Mother’s Day menu, chances are she’ll be sweet on you much longer than just during her special day.
Fun fare like this proves that food preparation can be easy, nutritious, inexpensive, fun and fast. They take just 10 seconds each to read and are almost that quick to prepare. These versions of such dishes are delicious evidence that everyone – including you and your kidlet helpers – has time for tasty home cooking and, more importantly, the healthy family time in the kitchen that goes along with it!
Another benefit: You effortlessly become a better cook since there are no right or wrong amounts when you create menus this way. These are virtually-can't-go-wrong combinations, so whatever you choose to use can't help but draw “wows” from Mom and everyone else at the table.
QUICK TIP OF THE WEEK: Smoothies, especially if they contain protein powder, have become a healthful, quick-to-prepare breakfast favorite of many. As much as the field has been growing to include not only fruits, but also vegetables, some staples have remained, like oranges and strawberries. To easily liven things up with simple changes that will dramatically tweak the flavor, consider another fruit in the same family, such as tangelos, tangerines, pink grapefruits or limes for oranges and raspberries, blackberries or blueberries for strawberries.
Lisa Messinger is a first-place winner in food and nutrition writing from the Association of Food Journalists and the National Council Against Health Fraud and author of seven food books, including the best-selling
The Tofu Book: The New American Cuisine with 150 Recipes (Avery/Penguin Putnam) and
Turn Your Supermarket into a Health Food Store: The Brand-Name Guide to Shopping for a Better Diet (Pharos/Scripps Howard). She writes two nationally syndicated food and nutrition columns for Creators Syndicate and had been a longtime newspaper food and health section managing editor, as well as managing editor of Gayot/Gault Millau dining review company. Lisa traveled the globe writing about top chefs for Pulitzer Prize-winning Copley News Service and has written about health and nutrition for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, Reader's Digest, Woman's World and Prevention Magazine Health Books. Permission granted for use on DrLaura.com.
