Breakfast At Our Place

Eating regular healthy breakfasts can significantly improve your health and productivity during the day. It regulates metabolism, prevents obesity and is also the meal that you're most likely  to eat fruit in. Since beginning my degree here last year, I've made an effort to eat large breakfasts each day. When I was in Busan, I'd often wake up at 11am, so breakfasts were out of the question.

Here at the Farrand household, Mrs F and I loosely take turns to prepare the morning meal. Sometimes we feel inventive, and sometimes it's the famous Bananas on Toast. Which, I might add, is a dish surprisingly more satisfying than one's hastily preconceived notions may conjure.

This is what I came up with recently. I guess it's a kind of fusion dish, with Malaysian fried rice, cheese and baked beans. Sounds funny eh? Well Heather liked it. And as Busan Mike will tell you, baked beans are not easy to come by over here.

Also, did you know that the humble baked bean is one of the main fillings in Malaysian curry puffs? You take them straight out of the can, wash the sauce off with water and mash them up with carrots, potatoes and spices.

And this is one of Heather's concoctions. It's a spicy shrimp bibimbap with 5-grain rice and liberally applied foliage. The judge's scores were as follows, Constitution: 6/10, Execution: 5/10, Nutrition: 9/10, Presentation 7/10.

It's hard to get nice fresh fruit juice in Korea. In Australia we have Crusta, Berri and The Daily Juice Company providing some pretty good stuff, but over here the equivalents are Minute Maid and Orion. Like most juices over here, they are not widely praised for their fruitiness, despite being present at every office refreshments layout, invariably served in paper cups.

One notable exception is this label, which translates to Morning Juice. It's made from Florida oranges and I quite like it. The price is over $3 per litre, but it's one of the few groceries that I don't mind paying a little more for.

I'd seen these little fellows around the market quite a few times before. Heather bought some recently and didn't know what they were called. Being the aspiring investigative journalist of marginal relevance that I am, I did a bit of poking around online and have determined them to be kumquats. They're like oranges but much smaller, and without much pleasant fleshiness inside. You eat them whole, without peeling them and they pretty much taste like a mouthful of citrus rind.

Which can be pleasant at first, but the sourness does make a belated appearance in the wake of the chew.

I encourage Heather to eat more of them, just so that I can see her make this face.

We usually wake up around 7am and finish eating before 8. It appears that our customary ritual after devouring the morning meal is to sit and stare at the empty plates for a while. This is due to a condition known as sleep inertia, which is characterised by the eyes being open but the brain still being somewhere in dreamland. Recently though, we've become a little more productive in our post-breakfast stage. For example, I have sometimes been known to select which socks I will wear for the day, even though sock-selection time usually isn't until 8:30am sharp. This extra flurry of activity may have inspired Mrs F to be equally as productive.

Last week she used the time to repair her ornamental plant with a band-aid. The flowering stem had been accidentally bent over and it was looking a little under the weather.

Although a newcomer to the world of emergency plant-repair, Mrs F successfully performed a flowering stem reattachment with surgical precision. We may well be pursuing the speedy recovery of Subject X here at Lee's Korea Blog over the coming weeks and months.

In excruciating detail.

As far as ornamental plants go, I don't think I've ever seen one as thrilled as Subject X, especially after being introduced to his specially-built recovery bay. 

If only all botanical dramas had an outcome this heartwarming...