Breakfast and Morning Snack

So, no school again today, so that means more posts!

As you've probably noticed, I mention food in many of my posts, so I think it's time for a post solely about food. There will be more to follow, as I'm only covering breakfast in this one and there is a lot of food here to talk about! Warning: I love food. I love thinking about food, looking at food, watching food being prepared, smelling food, going to grocery stores, preparing food myself, reading recipes, and eating food.

I've never considered myself a big breakfast person. Weekend breakfasts for me usually consist of many cups of coffee until 12:30, then making lunch. Seemingly, I should fit in here, as it seems that breakfast is not a large meal, but instead I have become a breakfast person without changing how much I eat.

Weekday breakfasts for me here are usually cereal, such as corn flakes, or chocolate rice krispies. Unless you are my mom reading this. In that case I eat high-fiber, high-protien, low-sugar cereal with skim milk, never biscotti or corn flakes, and I never ever ever take snack cakes to school. Only low-fat, unsweetened yogurt or fruit. Because I am a healthy eater, and my mom says fiber is healthy and too much sugar isn't.

Breakfasts are much sweeter, and smaller than in Canada. I'm pretty sure you would be looked upon as crazy if you tried to order eggs, sausage and bacon for breakfast. At home we eat biscotti - drier, medium sweetness cookies - with coffee or warm milk for breakfast. Other breakfasts I've seen include cakes, pastries, toast with honey, Nutella, or jam, sweeter breads (such as brioche), yogurt, and fruit. As I've mentioned, I don't usually eat large breakfasts, but sometimes when my family eats together, I look at the small plate of cookies and think, "So what are you guys eating?". It's also normal to eat leftover desserts from the night before (actually, come to think of it when I made my pumpkin pie, my host sister had a very very small piece after dinner, but more the following morning).

Based on what I've seen in grocery stores, cookies are where it's at for breakfasts. There are many choices, from high fiber, to extra chocolate, from light pastry, to dense cookies. And the funny thing is, they don't suck. I hate most packaged food in Canada. Store bought muffins and pastries have a gummy texture, cookies leave you with a terrible aftertaste. But here, pastries are light and flaky, and cookies don't leave you wondering if you got some sort of chemical poisoning. North American packaged food producers, take note!

At school we have a "recreational" break at 11. This is when the "little garden" fills up with smokers for twenty minutes, the bar at school gets overwhelmed, and I can get out of my stupid, too-small, uncomfortable desk and have a snack. Sometimes I try to fit in with the others and take a snack cake, or a package of crackers, or a piece of fruit for when I'm feeling healthy (my classmates also love my orange peeler). I've also taken cereal and milk, which earned me a few stares and quizzical looks, and once leftover risotto, which confused everyone a lot. The bar at school sells different breads and pastries (many with chocolate or Nutella), sandwhiches (filled with french fries), and hot dogs (which smell so amazing until I remember that hot dogs are really only good for the first few bites, and then I don't want to eat one for a year).

Alright here are some photos! Unfortunately (or possibly luckily) we didn't have any snack cakes. Lucky because I know they aren't healthy and I would devour three right now if we did.

So here we have some chocolate cookies (there were other, more chocolately ones, but I'm not sure where they disappeared to...), some lemony cookies, and a pastry cookie. Just one left, don't know where the others got to.

Cookies, chocolate milk powder, corn flakes, honey made by my host mom's nephew, high(ish) fiber cookies, premade toast, package of crackers that many people take to school as a snack, some peach juice (another popular school snack), cookies from the bakery that have an excellent flavour but are very hard and dry and definitely need tea to dunk in, and yogurt. The yogurt flavour is banana, and it is one of my favourites next to pineapple, which is strange because I hated those flavours in Canada. I seriously ate this right after taking the photo, and am staring at the empty container wishing it to refil itself.