The Beauty of Saturday Breakfast...

In previous posts, I’ve talked about the memories that a certain Filipino breakfast brings me.  But I never really talked about how a home cooked breakfast, no matter what it is, makes me really feel.  After a long work-week of instant oatmeal, hardboiled eggs, and pay-by-weight steam tray “country breakfasts”, I take pride in cooking a homemade breakfast. 

One of my earliest memories (Well hell!!!  This is a pretty recent memory!!!!) is the memory of waking up on a Saturday morning (never Sunday mornings because we were rushing to get to Church) to the smell of bacon frying,  the sound of sausage cooking, and to the pouring of the occasional flapjack onto a cast iron griddle.  I would wipe the sleep from my eyes, throw on my slippers, and rush downstairs to set the table so that we could sit down and eat.

With my father sitting at the head of the table, my brother and sister sitting across from me, and my mother sitting by my side, we would sit at the table and have discussions about everything.  My brother and father would argue about the simplest things; how algebra works or the inner workings of the car, while the rest of us sat by and watched them go at it.  My sister and I would go back and forth from the table, refilling platters with whatever breakfast food needed to be refilled.

When my mother had enough of the back and forth bickering between my brother and pops, she would sit with her face smooshed up and say “OK.  STOP IT NOW.”  Man… the memories.

This memory is cool, don’tchathink?  Well, here’s something even cooler.  We still do this.  My family is a busy one; the Valle kids have moved out of the house, my sister has a family of her own, including her husband and her 3 kids, myself with my partner, and my brother with his girlfriend, we all make attempts during holidays to replicate this.  We all meet at Casa de Cascade Lane and breakfast happens. 

When my nieces and nephews stay with my parents overnight, my parents wake up first thing in the morning and make breakfast for the kids, the same way they did for us when we all lived in the house.

As I’m writing this, tears of joy are starting to well in my eyes, because I now have a tradition to pass on to our children.

Saturday Breakfast

Onward and Upwards,

-Vince