The Unsavory Reality Of Breakfast In Bed

by Kevin Burton

   Certain things sound great, but once you examine them are really not.

   One such concept is breakfast in bed. People talk about breakfast in bed as a mother’s day or birthday kind of special thing you do for someone.  

   So I’m thinking about this and it hits me, who really wants breakfast in bed?  What the big deal?

   Now I love my bride and I want to pamper her. But wouldn’t there be some better way?

   Breakfast you don’t have to cook, isn’t that what we’re really talking about?  Well I’m all for that, but who needs the bed part?

   Breakfast in bed is really just an accident waiting to happen.

   You know who agrees with me? Tony Naylor. He’s the BBC‘s Food Writer Dude. That’s not his formal title, but it’ll do.

   “Like toast crumbs in bedding or jam stains on pillow cases, the halo of glamour that surrounds breakfast in bed is difficult to shift,” Naylor wrote. “It speaks to our dreams of luxury, of Hollywood stars in black-and-white films, Downton Abbey and a parallel universe where every morning a butler arrives at your bedside with freshly pressed juice, a neatly ironed newspaper, smoked salmon and eggs.”

  “‘Yes,’ you think, while hurtling around half-eating a banana at 7.43 am on a wintry Tuesday morning, ‘I could get used to that.’ But could you? Really? It is time to face facts,” Naylor wrote.

   “Like many of the things you fantasize about enjoying in bed, eating breakfast is better in theory than reality: more pain than pampering.”

   “Unless you are incredibly organized (did you soak oats, buy in bagels, make your muffin mixture last night?), breakfast often takes far longer to prepare than the reluctant chef or dozing recipient would like. Is there a more demoralizing feeling in cooking than reappearing, ta-da!, with perfect eggs benedict and finding your partner fast asleep?”

   “Comfortably eating and drinking on a sprung mattress, moreover, is impossible. You might imagine anything you can hold in one hand would work. But as anyone who has ever leaned over to take a slurp of tea, wobbled on their elbow and soaked the bed will tell you: ‘It does not,’” Naylor wrote.

   “Similarly, no matter how big a plate you use, if you eat a croissant, toast or a breakfast sandwich in bed (think of the lava-like yolk dangers!), you will – as you repeatedly fail to prop up your book or tablet at a readable angle – inevitably scatter food debris. You will be sleeping in it for days, potentially suffused in a lingering odor of kippers.”

   “Attempt to eat anything that requires a knife and fork and unless you own a specialist padded or fold-away breakfast tray, breakfast will descend into a cramped chaos of slip-sliding crockery, spillages and agitated discomfort.”

   Breakfast in bed? “No thank you,” Naylor wrote. “If you want to treat your lover, get up, cook, and call them down. The kitchen table is a wonderful invention.”

   You know who else agrees with me on the breakfast in bed thing? My bride, or at least that’s the way I am reading her reaction. 

   Asked about the prospect of breakfast in bed, Jeannette exclaimed, “You’ve never made me breakfast in bed!”

   Then she said, “Every once in a great while would be nice. Defined; once a year, maybe.”

   That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement.  It has to happen now though, because I opened my big mouth about it.

   When Jeannette and I started dating we had a standing Monday date. I would get off work at four and go home and start cooking. She would arrive at five and start eating. 

   I was making decidedly mediocre fare, Salisbury steak, macaroni and cheese, green beans or broccoli, something like that. 

   And she was knocking this stuff down as if I were some kind of French chef. Why? She didn’t have to cook it or do any cleaning afterward for that matter.

   So it’s the not cooking part that is appealing, not the bed.

   I googled, what’s so good about breakfast in bed to see if maybe I overlooked something. What do I get?

   First it’s what bed and breakfast I can go to locally. Then it’s recipes. That’s not what I wanted but I made the mistake of opening one of these recipe things, “50 Extra Special Recipes for Breakfast in Bed” on tasteofhome.com. 

   The second “recipe’ they offer: orange glazed bacon.

   Orange, glazed, bacon!  

   You know I’m not joking because I’m not that good, to come up with some nonsense like that. I’m like, better get your hands off my bacon fool, I’ll knock you out for sure!

   Breakfast in bed seems an equally silly idea.  But I’ll make it work for you, Sweety.