This morning’s Kale, Bacon, and Egg Whole Wheat Breakfast Sandwich

Day 5: Make breakfast today and plan next week’s breakfasts.

This morning I woke and up and made breakfast in a clean kitchen. And it felt so good. As I shared yesterday, my biggest deterrent to cooking everyday is a messy kitchen, so one of my goals for this Cooking Cure has been to clean the kitchen after every meal. Last night I cleaned the kitchen both before and after dinner (hopefully I won’t be doing that again for a long time!), which left me with a neat, sunny space in which to make my breakfast sandwich this morning…

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Sweet Potato Hash with Sausage & Eggs

Day 5: Friday, March 7
Today’s Assignment: Make breakfast!
Weekend Assignment: Plan all your breakfasts for next week
The Cooking Cure: See all assignments so far here.

Here we are at the end of first week of the Cooking Cure! How do you feel? Or the better question: how are you feeling about breakfast?

Your mission today, should you choose to accept it, is to make yourself breakfast. Your mission for the weekend is a little bigger.

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Earlier this year we shared a surprising tip that we had just discovered: You make better bacon (with less mess) by cooking it in water. Weird, right? But it really works! We decided that it would be better shown in video — take a look!

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Ten reads that made us think, made us giggle, or made us hungry this week, from a crazy morning TV chef to new sugar consumption guidelines (take a wild guess what they say).

• On the one hand, this video of a fake chef who made morning show hosts eat gross food is kind of sad. On the other hand, I can’t stop giggling. — Anjali
• Great idea: SipSnap, spill-proof drinking lids for kids that’ll fit any cup. – Cambria
• Gah. Are any plastics safe for food anymore? – Emma
• This it what happens when you feed Thai chiles to strangers in Times Square. – Ariel
• How Pabst Blue Ribbon became a billion-dollar beer. – Faith

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My husband and I really love our coffee. Do you? Maybe you too have a French press, an Aeropress, a Chemex, and a good burr grinder. (Oh, coffee toys; what a dangerous habit!) But there’s one sort of coffee we don’t make right now, and that’s pour over, a simple yet craftsmanlike method of slowly and meditatively soaking coffee grounds set in a filter over a cup or pitcher.

It’s one of the simplest ways to brew, but ironically it also offers some of the fanciest toys. Here are five really lovely and luxurious setups for making pour over coffee, plus a few more things that, no matter how simple or elaborate your setup, are still essential.

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I recently came across a really old recipe post that I wrote about having a sweet potato for breakfast, and I noticed the date: May, 2006, which put me at about four and a half months pregnant. My mother was in town to help me on a project, and one day, she made me breakfast out of a leftover sweet potato with yogurt.

Given my circumstances at the time — pregnant, famished, and overworked — I thought I should revisit this concoction to see if it was still as good as I remember in that unique and compromised state. Taste bud memories don’t lie.

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I cannot tell you how many months (eight? ten?) I have been intending to get a new spatula. As you can see in the bottom of the photo, my old spatula bears stains and deep scratches, frayed edges and a large missing chunk. Replacing Dear Old Spatula was the sort of thing I’d remember in the midst of using it, then put off until “later.” Last week when another little piece broke off, I realized I couldn’t ignore the situation any longer. I stopped cooking, pulled out my phone, and ordered TWO new spatulas on the spot. Why two? Let me explain…

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I secretly love those little packets of hot cocoa mix — but I recently decided to quit buying them and start making my own. The nice thing about making your own hot cocoa mix is that you have free control over what goes into it (and what stays out of it). Like yours super chocolatey? No problem. Want to take down the sugar and add a bit of cayenne and cinnamon? Do it.

Today, I’m sharing my recipe for basic hot cocoa mix, plus a few suggestions for mix-ins that I’ve been loving lately.

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