Neat Café in Burnstown, Renfrew County was my introduction years ago to the breakfast cookie. It quickly became a favourite. Today I was treated to a homemade version. My partner – in his usual demure manner – offered me a plate of the warm cookie direct from the oven. Heavenly! My immediate thought was I mustn’t make a habit of this.
Today is an ideal late winter’s day, a moment frozen. Lethargy prevails. There likewise persists a sharp winter glaze – a blinding predominance of white overseen by a vast dome of unremarkable blue. The combination persuaded me to drive my car rather than to ride my tricycle. The resolve was short-lived as the Stoic sway of my daily ritual eventually won over.
After completing my statutory vehicular passage to the car wash on Campeau Drive then, refreshed, having sailed home nonchalantly from Renfrew County, I hesitatingly unfastened the lock from the garage cage where I store my tricycle. Carefully I backed it onto the sidewalk. Once having animated the tricycle odometer and my Apple Watch (Outdoor Cycle), I wound my way onto the dry garage floor to complete the mandatory 3Kms back and forth. This, I felt, was ample balance of the breakfast cookie.
Breakfast has throughout my lifetime been a necessary start to my day. Oddly my mother seldom ate breakfast. I cannot recall my father’s habit – especially since he was never bound by the customary times for rising. By contrast breakfast was part of my ritual day, both while growing up at boarding school and university and afterwards during my career. For approximately thirty years – whilst I attended the workday morning klatch at the Superior Restaurant with John H. Kerry, Nicholas Magus, W. Ross Taggart OLS, Garry Davis, Joe Sensenstein and others – the ceremony was timed to the minute, beginning at 8:00 am and ended promptly at nine o’clock as each of us headed to performance of our duties. Mrs. Gladys Currie managed the assembly. She had an acute memory of what each of us ate and drank unrepentantly each day. In my case it was the 911 Special – bacon, eggs, buttered toast, peanut butter and black coffee. Eventually I had open heart surgery and that was the end of that.
Thereafter I experimented with a diversity of breakfast menus – though I always continued to hover close to the toxic habits. I’ve never really fully excused myself from bacon and eggs but I have to say the breakfast cookie makes for a competitive start.
I have learned to flirt with breakfast by attempting steel cut oats, porridge (sans brown sugar) and the more indulgent granola. In the process I have discovered the unparalleled value of banana. Naturally I have graduated to organic peanut butter.
The French – de la France – are notorious for preferring a chocolate croissant for breakfast. I must agree that a croissant and espresso is a civilized breakfast but I suspect it would prove insufficient to my appetite. Breakfast at the golf club in the Village of Appleton has forever been an attraction. Chef Wendy MacDonald has for years maintained an inexpressible rendition of the meal, ample and delectable. The thought of lounging on the patio overlooking the tee is especially inviting today as we enter into the springtime narrative – albeit momentarily burdened by the implacable snow and Arctic air.
Nevertheless I am quick to assert that the predominant ingredient of my preferred breakfast is neither the scenery nor the time of year; rather it is the delivery of taste. My current menu of freshly cooked steel cut oats (ornamented with frozen fruit and Bam dates from the Iran) and two fried eggs (avocado oil and Maldon salt) is unsurpassable. But I won’t pretend to withdraw from the temptation of a breakfast cookie.