Parents and food writers are constantly yammering on about serving their children breakfast for dinner. What a treat it is! How easy! they exclaim. Why did we never think of this before?!
Perhaps for them pancakes for dinner is both a treat and an easy meal, but not in this house. Alas, I cannot get some of my kids to even eat breakfast for breakfast. 
Several of the kids have sworn off milk, and I do not consider dry cereal breakfast. Yogurt and eggs fall in an out of favor. And even the fun breakfast foods are unpopular: Not only do waffles and pancakes go largely uneaten, but I generally find Bennett’s portion wedged under the table top several days after I’ve served it. Sometimes I even find it months later, fossilized in its own mold. Frankly, once you’ve seen a waffle in advanced decay, it’s hard to eat one again. (Also, it’s hard for me to scold him when I used to do the same thing with the soggy, gelatinous, boiled carrots I was served in school, but I scraped mine under the chair.)
So you can imagine how thrilled I was when I discovered that my difficult breakfast eaters wanted miso soup for breakfast. At the hotel in Vancouver they served an Asian breakfast as part of the breakfast buffet, with miso soup and several salads. Oh, and a ton of rice. The kids were so mesmerized, that when I came home we whipped up a batch and they’ve been sucking it down ever since. It even travels well in a thermos.
Yes, I feel rather smug and Gwynesque about the whole thing – although her recipe is way too labor intensive and not any better than the one I make by throwing miso and water in a blender, blitzing it, adding some soy sauce and then heating (never boiling) it on the stove:

But, while it’s all very good and healthy that I’m carting around a thermos of miso instead of coffee, miso soup is an ugly dribble. It’s one thing to spill coffee on yourself when you’re driving, but if you do it with miso, you look like this:

Yup, that’s miso soup and not puke on my arm. And I spent the day like that because not only did I not have a free second to change, but I could not for the life of me figure out what else to put on once my running jacket was mucked up. Pathetic. And if I have seaweed in the soup, it’s worse — because that just looks like dried-up, caked-on boogers, and frankly the kids wipe enough of the real variety on me.. I don’t need any more.
The boys in this house may not be getting any breakfast at all tomorrow. In fact, I may refuse to feed them for the week. In addition to setting off stink bombs in the girls’ bedroom, they decided to go all out and stuff rocks into Fiona’s pillow and water balloons and fake ants into Francie’s bed. Luckily, they’re dumb as hell and we heard them bragging to anyone who’d listen, so M snuck in and de-pranked the room before the girls went in.
Miso? Those little turds are getting bread and water.

Posted in children, health, running, Uncategorized on Jun 30, 2012