Breakfast for Dinner

I'm going to admit: I rarely eat breakfast. Lately it's mostly because I've been waking up at a more lunchtime hour, but even when I have early classes I really can't scrounge up the effort to make something first thing in the morning. On top of that, breakfast-type foods like milk and eggs and sugary things tend to sit really badly in my groggy stomach.

My new favorite thing these days, though, is breakfast for dinner. When you're too lazy or uninspired to cook something "serious", pancakes! Yogurt and granola! Baked apples! Leftover starchy things with a fried egg on top! Breakfast for dinner is something I've gravitated to due to my resolution to eat less meat, too. Eggs, I've discovered, especially with nice oozy molten yolks, are the perfect thing to end your day on a good note.

With that said, check out dinner tonight:

Ok, it's not that pretty. But it was delicious! I made a sort of pasta salad by searing together in a hot pan some of the kabocha gnocchi I made the other day, turkey kielbasa, spinach, and apple . It's topped with a sprinkle of apple vinegar, a hearty dusting of extra sharp cheddar, and a fried peppered egg. The combination was perfect. The slight sweetness of the (perfectly tender!) gnocchi was complimented well by the rendered grease of the salty, rich kielbasa. The spinach lent subtle fresh bitterness at the end. Diced fuji apple was the last thing to be added, after all the other ingredients were thoroughly cooked.  Their crunchy, honeyish bite was the perfect textural contrast to the other soft ingredients. All together, this was a light but filling dinner that is really pretty healthy when you get right down to it!

And I feel proud of myself that I've finally gotten over my fruit-in-a-savory-dish phobia. I'd like to thank the brie and apple crepe I ate in Boston for that!

The other good thing about breakfast for dinner, as opposed to breakfast for, well, breakfast is... dessert!

Class in a glass. Otherwise known as vanilla ice cream (with Real Bean Specks[tm]) with hot blackberries and raspberries from the freezer, continuing the arguably healthy trend tonight! Plus, I need to justify this blog's name somehow. I actually picked these berries myself two summers ago while I was living alone on campus for work. Raspberries, blackberries, tiny wild blueberries and strawberries, pears, choke cherries, apples... it's really a blessing that this campus and the forest surrounding it is so rich! Dinner almost every night that summer was dumplings and fresh picked blueberries, simmered into soup in a pan. Berries are nature's perfect food.