Help me understand the economics of breakfast

Been a while since the last entry. The lack of meat has really had an adverse effect on my thinking. Going well so far, just difficult when lunch time at the office comes. You walk into the staff eating area and you find your colleagues feasting on grilled chicken, burgers, stews, etc. Not a nice feeling. As a result I have my lunch thirty minutes before they do.

The meal I look forward to the most is thus Saturday breakfast as this is when I put a temporary halt to being vegetarian. As you can imagine, I go quite heavy on the grease either cooking it at home or going to the nearest coffee shop. I am not really a fan of those buffet breakfasts. I am quite fussy when it comes to breakfast and my tune is this: from pan to plate in less than a minute. I just don’t like those metal dishes with those warmers underneath that have sausages kept warm in their steam for thirty minutes. Worse with the bacon, as it tends to go hard when not eaten immediately. The scrambled eggs sometimes have this moat of water around them. Not too pleasing to the eye.

Last week I tried to calculate what would be cheaper, going out for breakfast or making my own. A no brainer I hear you say. Well, it’s not as simple as that. Let’s do a comparison using a group of three people: me, the madam and a hung over mate of mine.

A traditional breakfast consisting of two fried eggs, two rashers of bacon, two pork bangers, grilled tomato & a slice of toast goes for R29.00. Let’s make it R37.00 as one would include a glass of juice, cool drink. The bill for three people is thus R120.00

Cooking at home would come up to this:

Half dozen eggs – R10.00
Pack of bacon – R20.000
Litre of juice – R10.00
Sausages – R20.00
Tomatoes – R5.00

That comes up to about R65. I haven’t added the bread, butter, etc. assuming you already have these in your fridge. Still, its cheaper to make your own. That makes sense. It would obviously not make sense to make b

My confusion is with the buffet breakfasts. If it costs you about R22.00 to get a good, filling breakfast then why do people go and spend R80.00 on a buffet breakfast? That doesn’t make sense to me. A quick search has revealed the most expensive breakfast, which includes a 100g steak would set you back about R50.00. Still, that’s a saving of R30.00. So why do people do buffet breakfasts?

Not only is it not a romantic thing (in my humble opinion, mass produced food is a turn off) but surely its also not healthy to eat that much at the start of the day.

Buffet dinners I can understand because some of the stuff they make there might be a bit difficult and time consuming, but not the breakfasts.

For the next couple of weeks, I am 71.5% vegetarian…

After thinking long and hard about what to give up during Lent ( I have never given up anything), I decided that I should make up for all those times when I gave up nothing and go big. So, I decided on meat. Then I remembered that in our African culture it is very rude to refuse food from other people, especially meat. The final decision was this: no meat from midnight on Sunday/Monday morning till midnight on Friday/Saturday morning. This is because weekends have sport, birthday parties, etc. and there is meat involved. Weekends are also the only time one gets to sit down and have a proper fry up breakfast, and I just couldn’t give that up.

It has been three days now, and its going very well. Early days, I guess. I have a couple of cookbooks so I shouldn’t battle with some decent nosh and should save me a couple of rands too. The first day, I made this Afghani aubergine casserole and thought I would share my revamped version with you. Instead of grilling the aubergines, Reza Mahammad (that gay looking fella on BBC Food) fries them. The dish becomes too oily for my liking. We all know how aubergines mop up all the oil when you fry them.

Cut about 600g of aubergines into 1 cm thick slices. Salt lightly and drizzle with olive oil. Put on a roasting pan and roast for about 20 minutes on 180 °C, turning it after ten minutes. The aubergine should be slightly brown. While this is roasting, fry some garlic and green chillies in vegetable oil, and add a can of chopped tomatoes that are blended into a smooth liquid. Add a teaspoon of ground cumin, a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of sugar. Let this simmer for twenty minutes into a sauce consistency, and add salt and black pepper to taste.

You then take a shallow baking tray and spread a third of the tomato sauce. Pile a layer of the grilled aubergine, and then sprinkle some chopped mint. Add another third of the tomato sauce and then repeat the process. Put this in an oven and bake at 190°C for 30 minutes. The end dish looks like a vegetarian lasagna without the white sauce, and is lovely with naan bread or rice.

This dish actually gave me hope that this period will actually be quite enjoyable. At first I thought I would have to buy those ready made Arabiatta sauces and frozen vegetarian pizzas. Hopefully, when I write next week my spirits will still be this high.

So…. if you love meat and want to visit me, don’t come during the week

Let’s give some respect to the producers of the food we eat….. When we can.

I had to put the ‘when we can’ part. I had a lengthy talk about this with a friend who was delighted about some ‘meals in minutes’ website that had been forwarded to her. I asked her why she wants to cook meals that fast. Food, in my opinion needs to be cooked for a reasonable period of time to get the flavors going. Try frying a mutton chop and some herbs, spices in butter and using the same stuff throw one in the oven and grill it on moderate heat. There is a huge difference. I like to think of myself as a Gordon Ramsay kinda guy; I don’t like food that is cooked with a micro wave, or worse a pressure cooker.

Why do I think food needs to be cooked in what is gastronomically called a loving manner?

It boils down to acknowledging the work that went into growing the vegetables you eat or raising the cow that end up as a rib-eye steak on your plate. It takes a lot of nurturing and sacrifices from the farmer’s side to get the animal to be in a condition where it can be slaughtered and sold. A lot of love goes into raising animals; you do get attached to them. Farmers will walk through rain to find lost sheep, rush a sick calf to the vet who might be two hours away. My parents used to raise chickens when we were growing up. Slaughtering them was a bitter sweet moment; happy for the meat but sad that there would be one less chicken to feed and chase around. To ease the pain, mom would lovingly cook the chicken with spring onion, carrots salt and chicken stock.

I understand that we live very hectic lifestyles and one cannot be expected to do roasts and oxtail stews after work on a daily basis. There is, however nothing wrong with stir-fry or Carbonara pasta once in a while. Quick to make, decent nosh. Or making a genuine Alfredo sauce, as opposed to the store stuff you simply mix with boiling milk. Why kill the flavour of nice, aged ham with chemicals?

The ‘meals in minutes’ brigade can argue by saying that farmers now raise chickens in half the time it used to take and get birds half the price. If you religiously eat that kind of chicken, then you shouldn’t be reading this blog. You should be Googling for the world record for the fastest grown chicken.

I look forward to the day when people go back to cooking food, as opposed to the current practice of preparing food. Micro waving frozen veggies can’t be called cooking. I would rather buy the precooked meals at our super markets than do those. Atleast those were cooked, I hope.

Honestly, if you can’t set aside thirty minutes an evening to make a meal, then you seriously need to rearrange your schedule.

Yes, I made the NO TO MEALS IN MINUTES thing. Took me thirty minutes, same time it should take to make your fastest meal.