The Loose Connections Recommender #20

On Dinner For Breakfast & Other Random Acts of Joyful Eating

There’s something about doing things back to front that has always appealed to me. I can’t help it, I’m a natural born rebel. And leftover pizza for breakfast has to be one of my favourite ways to fuck shit up.

Take me to Pizza Land

I also love any kind of pie for breakfast, along with Spaghetti Napoletana or roast veggies reheated in the oven with cheese on top, curry and rice, quesadilla with beans and avocado and sour cream … A night spent chilling in the fridge just seems to imbue these hearty, aromatic foods with an added laissez faire charm, all the flavours meet and greet and mingle and give the dish the kind of umami hit chefs would give their best knife for. How many times have you seen ‘twice baked potatoes’ on a fancy restaurant menu and gone weak at the knees? Chefs know leftovers just hit the spot.

Great Dinners For Breakfast I Have Had

And though I often don’t bother with breakfast at all, or wait until late in the day when I’ll combine it with lunch, a hearty feast for breakfast sure starts the day right. And pizza and coffee is a weirdly great combination.

Author Adelle Davis, born in 1904 and America’s first noted nutritionist, coined the still oft quoted phrases ‘Breakfast like a king; lunch like a prince; dinner like a pauper’ and ‘You Are What You Eat’.

Though her theories of healthy eating (mainly avoid processed, refined and commercialised food, take ALOT of supplements, eat your organic vegetables, eat less meat, exercise more) were often considered controversial, dangerous and wacky when she first began spouting them in the 1940s, they are not far off what modern nutritionists recommend and mostly excellent guidance.

Unfortunately her tendency to fill her hugely popular books with misrepresented scientific data and impressively long reference pages that didn’t actually correlate with the information given, saw her written off as a quack, along with her terrible recommendation for giving large doses of potassium chloride to babies with colic - tragically one baby boy died from her advice.

In an interesting side note, she also embraced LSD in her sixties and published the book Exploring Inner Space about her experiences with the drug under the pseudonym of Jane Dunlap.

And nothing to do with anything, but I must confess I love the sassy sailor style zip up uniform dress she is wearing in the interview below and would like one of my own.

Preparing food is really such a creative act, working out what goes together and how flavours, textures and colours will mesh and magnify each other best. I tend to approach cooking in the same way I embark on most of my creative pursuits - full of optimism and openness, embracing chaos and looking for the pearls that hide within.

I love to open the fridge after managing to avoid the supermarket for a few days, investigate its odd collection of remaining contents and work out what dish I can make based on what’s within.

An excerpt from a 2016 interview I did somewhere and stand by

Its time for me to put my money where my mouth is, or something along those lines, open the fridge and see what I can fix for a Sunday morning feast (I live in the land Down Under for my readers on the other side of the world that might be contemplating what to have for dinner on Saturday night).

I am grateful to myself for having cooked a delicious Southern inspired spread for dinner last night that is sure to now make for an excellent savoury breakfast.

Wishing you all dinner for breakfast, well/half stocked fridges and happy and creative cooking experiments in your days ahead - that’s my Loose Connections Recommender number 20! Go forth and multiply x