Here’s what else I love about the breakfast-for-dinner concept:
- If you’re in a dinner rut, breakfast for dinner is a fun way to shake things up.
- If you’re a parent, caregiver or anyone who regularly cooks for kids, it’s a great way to get little ones excited for dinnertime.
- If you’re looking to eat less meat, breakfast for dinner makes it easy to create filling meals that don’t rely on it. Yes, bacon, sausage, ham, smoked fish and the like are all wonderful parts of breakfast, but meat is not at the center of most morning plates the way it tends to be for dinner.
- If you’re trying to spend less on groceries, breakfast for dinner almost always uses ingredients that are cheaper than lots of the foods we typically associate with evening meals (see above re: meat and fish).
This week’s recipe lineup included Mushroom and Asparagus Hash, Banana Pancakes and Tex-Mex Migas. For the final installment in this series, I’m sharing my own recipe for a frittata filled with kale, scallions and feta. While it’s ideal for breakfast for dinner, of course you can have it any time of the day … even morning! Serve with hash browns, biscuits, toast, sauteed greens, salad, fruit or any other egg-friendly side dish.
This recipe is truly a road map. Any cooking green can be used instead of the kale, any allium can be swapped in for the scallions, and any cheese can take the place of the feta. (You’ll find many more ideas in the substitutions list below the recipe.)
This week has had me thinking about some of my favorite breakfast memories. Two stand out. When I was a child at summer sleepaway camp, our counselor once told us that she couldn’t wait to go to sleep so she could wake up and eat breakfast. This moment has stuck with me all these years. When I feel really excited about a meal I’m anticipating, I remember her unabashed enthusiasm. I love that food offers us something so satisfying to look forward to.
My other favorite breakfast memory is not a specific moment, but the blur of mornings I first spent with Grace. We’ve now been married for more than a decade, but those early days felt so exciting, and we wanted to extend all of the time we had together. That included the mornings where we’d try to stretch our days with tall stacks of pancakes and big breakfast boards with fruit, toast, cheese, and pots of jam and honey. I actually wrote in The Washington Post about the pancakes Grace used to regularly make for us (we’re babies in that photo!), and how their diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes as an adult changed some of how we cook and eat together and how we care for each other.
I wrote that piece in 2018, just three years after Grace was diagnosed. Now that another six years have elapsed, I must say we’ve both gotten much more relaxed about what and how we eat. We trust our bodies more and continue to try to be as kind as possible to them. Overall, we approach food in our house with more flexibility and agency: We both eat what we want to eat, when we want to eat it. And, yes, we still love breakfast, no matter what time of day we eat it. Especially when it’s for dinner.
