Of all the we meals eat, more people tolerate, even desire, repetition at breakfast than for any other meal. My dad ate a bowl of instant oatmeal every day of his working life with milk and sugar on it and a cup of instant coffee to go with it. I know some who find a piece of toast is all they need every morning. Maybe it is too hard to be imaginative about breakfast when the main morning goal is to pull ourselves together to go and face the world. Maybe it is just plain comforting to rely on a favorite daily breakfast. Personally, I like variety.
My young friend Meg visiting from Maryland this past week, reported on a breakfast she enjoyed in Boston that we recreated here one day during her stay. On the menu, it was listed as a Jerusalem Bowl (probably in honor of Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s Jerusalem: A Cookbook, a popular and inspiring new work) but at heart it is a grain bowl, a concept fairly new to we New Englanders who are accustomed to our grain made into porridge). The one Meg ate had a base of cooked farro, an ancient wheat that has been popularized recently, with feta cheese crumbled into it, a spoonful of curried vegetables spooned on, a bit of salad added, salsa, and a fried egg. She loved it, and wanted to learn how to make curried vegetables from scratch, so one morning, we made our own breakfast grain bowl when I showed her how to do a curry based on a recipe in my ancient copy of Anna Thomas’s Vegetarian Epicure.
As I put the dish together, though, I thought about how a grain bowl would absorb dabs of leftovers: cooked cauliflower, broccoli, beets, green beans; leftover salad; a few shreds of cooked chicken or pork; maybe a few chickpeas or lentils. How about chutney instead of salsa? Leftover cooked rice, barley, wheat berries, or quinoa instead of farro? click here to continue reading.
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