“Hello, I would like some breakfast please” I say.

And, within minutes, I am hit with a million billion decisions to make. There is really only one decision I can make in the couple of hours after waking: the one about whether I actually need to get up or not. Anything else, I wish to run to some kind of well-oiled schedule. (Can schedules be oiled? I just imagine slimy pieces of paper when I say that, but you know, slimy paper isn’t always a bad thing, right?)(I don’t know what that meant. I didn’t even know while I was typing it. Sorry). ANYWAY.

In the land of a thousand choices there are, I have discovered, a thousand choices within each choice, and sometimes a few more thrown in for good measure.

And that applies, of course, all over the place, in every meal, retail experience or any situation you can imagine. But one of the best examples of this can be summed up within the simple meal of breakfast.

Simple meal indeed. She said, in a disbelieving yet knowing tone.

You know what’s simple? Cereal. I used to eat cereal at home: that was simple.

I was never particularly a breakfast person before I moved to San Francisco. I was pretty boring about the whole thing, in fact. Only started eating breakfast at all a two or three years ago, and stuck rigidly to a small set of staple things: Special K with dried fruit of trail mix spinkled on top; ryvita and vegemite and, at the weekend, something fancier, like a full cooked breakfast or something brunchy - a variation on eggs benedict, most often. Or, in fact, always.

And it was another one of the things that I didn’t think I’d have to think about to much. The cereals I knew seemed pretty universal; they would be over here too, right? In fact, I knew I’d seen them in supermarkets; it would all be very simple.

Ha. Again with the word ’simple’… I really should know better by now.

Fact is, you can’t rely on anything to be the same. Everything’s tailored to fit the tastes of whatever market it’s being made for, and everything is made with the resources most plentiful. Special K, the thing I seized upon on my first shopping expedition, feeling relieved to have my hands on something familiar? Familiar, but not the same. It’s sweeter, and quite possibly made out of corn rather than rice.

So. I started a big journey through breakfastland, in search of something that was either familiar, or that I could make so, because it was so yummy. I’ve had grains, breads, meats, eggs and various forms of batter.

And I’ve ended up eating porridge every day. Plain. Made with water and only a pinch of salt. But that’s not for lack of imagination, I promise. It’s by way of:

CEREALS

American supermarket aisles, as a rule, are very, very long. American cereal aisles are very long, very brightly coloured, and very tightly packed with cartoon characters you’ve never seen before promising you nutrients you never even knew you needed.

“400,000% of your daily requirement of flopsaflavin B!” says a speech bubble coming out of something that could be either a parrot or a banana.
“Oh” you think “I didn’t even realise I was lacking in flopsaflavin B” - quite correctly, as it turns out, since it turns out to mean ‘plastic toy dust’ or something as nutritionally unnecessary.

There are boxes that seem to be entirely composed of things you shouldn’t eat for breakfast: miniature chocolate chip cookies that you pour milk on and eat with a spoon. Little brown and orange balls that taste of chocolate covered peanut butter cups and contain more sugar than if you simply cast a bowl made out of chocolate and peanut butter and munched down on it. And that’s probably available: I just haven’t found it yet. There are things with marshmallows and with nougat. Real chunks of fruit, real chunks of muffin, god knows there’s probably one out there with real chunks of the Berlin Wall in it, I just haven’t found it yet.

No, wait, I have. I have, and it was called granola.
I actually went through a granola phase earlier in the year. How MUCH of that phase was due to the fact it was called ‘Aunt Fanny’s’ and the word fanny makes my inner-child giggle, I cannot say.
But quite a lot, basically.

Granola has something in common with museli, in that it’s made out of recognisable natural foodstuffs, but in granola they’re clustered into little groups, rolled in honey or syrup solutions and then baked in the fifth circle of hell until they’re hard enough to kill a person if dropped on their skull from a second floor balcony. I used to marvel at the Barbican because someone told me the towers were so tall, you’d split someone’s skull in half by dropping a penny off the top. Drop granola, and not even dental records would identiify them. I like granola, don’t get me wrong. Most have the benefit of feeling good for you, though only if it’s because you had to work to damned hard to eat them.

Speaking of hard, Grape Nuts are another crazy phenomenon. Taken from castrated grapes and deep fired in kilns for several years to reach their famous consistency. “They won’t soften in milk!” exclaims the box, excitedly. No. They won’t, and for good reason. They’ve been developed by dentists for nefarious profit-boosting purposes.

That may not be actually, technically true. But I imagine evil dentists do love them for the the tooth cracking side effects.“Grape-nuts? Profit-raisins more like!”, they must joke, at their EvilDentistCon parties.

And this is not to say that these things aren’t nice.
Everything’s nice. Mostly everything. Mostly everything tastes like it was engineered with a hyperactive eight-year-old’s favourite boost-foods in mind, but in a nice way.

Sugar pervades. You’d think they were sweet enough already, but a cheerful national character is not, apparently, an impediment to having just a little more sugar. In everything. Even savouries are sweet, the sneaky bastards. Just when you’re expecting them to be when you’re expecting them to be entirely savory - even boring things like Sooper Dooper Fiber Hoops and Bran Platters and Shredded Wood and other things that are meant to be invigorating for body, mind, heart and bowel alike - a sweetness will pervade, no matter how little you might expect it.

That’s not to say that there aren’t benefits to be found in pop tarts or bowls of chocolate chip cookies submerged in milk, and I may yet explore that in multimedia form. We’ll see.

MILK

Milk comes in these giant breezeblock-style cartons which you modestly try to resist until you realise that a) you don’t have to go to the shops as often and b) the fridges are all designed for such things and anything smaller looks a bit pathetic, like it’s hanging around in the fridge door waiting for its mum to come and pick it up.

So, as it turns out, it’s actually a lot more convenient. Thought if you’re used to the idea of popping down to the shops for a carton of milk, a couple of cartons of juice (same size), some fizzy pop (generally even larger), and perhaps some wine (annoyingly standard in size (though much larger bottles ARE available (am I in multiple quotes right now? Oh, yes, how dreadful of me (Sorry) I’ll stop it) if you should want them), and in a glass bottle which is heavier to begin with) and if you are used to, perhaps, the crazy-insane habit of walking home, then you can expect to look like some kind of knuckle-dragging ape after a couple of weeks. These things are HEAVY.

So, if you drink milk at all - or any milklike substance, you have choices. More than you’d think you would need. You’ve got milk, plain and simple; then half&half, which I think is half cream half milk; then you’ve got 2%, which is semi-skimmed; 1%, which is half way between semi-skimmed and skimmed (so that would be skimmed-semi-skimmed on a milk compass, I suppose); and non-fat, which is skimmed, and pretty self-explanatory.

If you can’t drink milk at all, there is soy milk, rice milk, nut milk and, bizarrely, normal milk that manages to be lactose free.

In my house, where we have a conflict of dietary requirements and allergies, we started off getting different milk, until we realised that was insane in terms of volume, and ended up getting lactose-free non-fat milk. Which, some would argue, is, in fact, non-milk. It is milk with all the things that make it milk taken out. It’s basically a carton full of milk-void.
Tastes quite nice in coffee, though.

COFFEE

Clearly, if you live here, you will make coffee to your own taste.

But, while out and about, in diners, restaurants and cafes, you will be amazed and delighted at the concept of completely free refills, as many as you want, and generally without asking for them. You will be amazed by this until you realise you’re basically drinking sequential cups of red-hot brown water. I’m not sure if it’s just the west coast (though other places I’ve been have been as bad), but I’ve powered through about seven cups per sitting without it having a noticeable effect on my level of wakiness. That’s just wrong.

It’s coffee. It’s meant to wake you up, that’s kind of why you drink it. If it was spectacular-tasting, people wouldn’t mask the flavour of it so often with cream, milk, sugar, syrups etc. You drink it to wake up. Thus, making it piss-weak and super-hot, as they do, defeat the object. For me, at least.

It’s one of the benefits of going to otherwise dreadful just-the-way-you-like-it chains. There I can say ‘with THREE EXTRA SHOTS OF ESPRESSO, DAMNIT!” and not look like I’m asking for something alien, or wrong. Unless I actually shout. And/or use the word damnit. While shouting. That would almost certainly be rude.

TEA

If you’re a tea person, and I know a lot of you are, then you’ll be presented with a whole different deluge of choices when requesting a brew.

“Can I have a cup of tea?” will result in a laundry list of exotic place names, colours, and flowery sounding concoctions. You’ll probably want English Breakfast Tea - and be sure to ask for milk if you want it, it probably won’t come as standard.

I don’t drink tea. Outside the house. I drink vats of iced green tea at home, but that’s a different topic (one for my ‘How To Pee Like A Racehorse In Ten Easy Steps’ chapter). Other than that, I don’t drink tea.

If I did, I’d go a little crazy, every time they, at the fancier establishments, brought you a cup of hot water and a box of teabags to choose from on the side. “Look here, matey” I would say, in my best Queenly accent (and yes, she would totally say ‘matey’ in this situation, I guarantee it) “I would like this here teabag, right?… But can you take it away and pour some actual boiling water over it? This off-the-boil tepid shit simply won’t do at all” (Please stop grousing at the back, I have it on good authority that this is how her maj talks all the time).

Iced tea’s nice though. I don’t know why we don’t drink more of that at home. I always did, but that was mainly because I’m too forgetful to remember to drink anything at all while hot, so had to find a way to redeem it. Iced Tea is nice - though unless you are the honeymonster (and depending where in the country you are, but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb all the same) I’d advise you to get unsweetened and sweeten it to taste afterward.

COOKED BREAKFASTS

The american standard - or at least the one I’ve come across most often - comprises of eggs, bacon, pancakes and toast. And then there are the other things. I’ll break this down some more…

EGGS (ANY STYLE)

Or just eggs. TWO EGGS, the menu will say, usually with a confusing (ANY STYLE) following it.
They won’t explain the available styles, of course, they’re so generic that they think there’s no point. It’s one of the chief mysteries I had adjusting to life in my first year in America. The fact that there are a known set of rules to many things. And they’re strict, and people will look at you funny if you don’t know them. But if you don’t* know them, there’s no real way of finding out what they are. Because they’re sometimes particular to the region, the situation, the time of day: and even if they’re NOT, people find it hard to understand they might need explaining to someone what they are, or why they’re so weird.

For some reason, it reminds me of the time I was in a train station in Bologna, passing the time waiting for my friend, who was trying to find the bathroom. I read the only book on the bookstand that was in English, which happened to be the Italian to English phrasebook, for use by Italians travelling abroad (most likely to the UK). I remember one page, that had the indispensable phrase for any tourist in London:
“Excuse me, where is the nearest tube station?”
And the indescribable follow-up question, which only comes (for a Londoner) with a side order of the image of someone’s face if asked it:
“Why is it so far away?”

It’s not exactly the same question, but it does sum up the disparity between “questions every tourist wants to ask” and “questions no local will know how to answer”.

The thing is, if you say “Hello! Wwhat do you mean ‘any way’, exactly?” the answer you’ll get most often is “Oh, yaknow. Like, “Any Way”.” which doesn’t exactly help. Feels like a poor Italian tourist having to deal with the answer “Eh? It just IS. That’s where it is. What’s wrong with you?”

So. here are the few ways I know to order when the menu says TWO EGGS (ANY STYLE)

Sunny Side Up: - Just fried. Generally, be aware, fried eggs are fried very lightly, so expect not only the yolk runny, but often some of the white too.
Over: - Fried, then flipped, so the yolk is sealed in, and the whole thing cooked through.
Over easy: - Same as above, but much more lightly cooked: The yolk (and possibly white, as above) will be runny.
Scrambled: - You know what scrambled means. Can be many variations, from egg-salad-lumpy to almost like puree and packed with cream. I have no sense of the rules for being able to request one type or another though. Sorry. I’ll look into this.
Poached - Means poached! Yay. V soft though, obv.

Omelettes are also available. Any omelette can be made with egg whites (because you get the protein but not the fat or cholesterol), or with “beaters” which, as far as I can tell, appear to be egg whites, with the yolk left in but some yellow colouring, so they feel more like you’re eating proper eggs.

One of my favourite breakfasts is Green Eggs & Ham, which I kind of made up myself, but is basically just a mash-up of other things. For two people, it’s made with one egg (sometimes two) a bunch more egg whites, some torn spinach leaves, some thinly sliced lean ham, a spoon of wholegrain mustard and some salt and pepper and things. It’s really good, especially if served with nice granary toast and a couple of spoonfuls of salsa. Salsa Verde (made out of tomatillos rather than tomatoes) is nicest with it. But it’s not a breakfast if you’re going to the gym or otherwise being active. Not enough carbohydrates. Anyway.

FANCY SCHMANCY EGG DISHES

First, and almost only, there is Eggs benedict - which I’ve long been planning not only a post about, but a whole blog about. The rest will follow. In fact, we’re barely there on breakfasts - we’re yet to touch on biscuits, waffles, the crazy non-puritan attitude toward booze at brunch, or home fries or the lovely, lovely pancakes I call “yes”.

I don’t call them “home”, clearly. And I don’t call them right: not with the lashings of bacon and maple syrup I pile on top of them. But wholeheartedly, and homeishly, and with all the love in heart, I call them Yes.

And more about that in part two. three. Whatever. This post is only SOME of what I have to say on the matter. Sorry, I was planning on sitting down and writing things because that’s what a blog is, and I thought I should publish it, perfect, finished or no, because that was the point of my exercise. So the next part will come. Sometime…