Gotta Love Breakfast To The Moon And Back

by Kevin Burton

   What’s for breakfast?

   Good question. Fun question. Breakfast means morning and morning means a new day. A new start. A little surge of hope. And breakfast means fuel for the journey.

   So, what’s for breakfast?

  The topic takes me back to Saturday mornings in the days of Cap’n Crunch and Hong Kong Phooey.

   For those of you who weren’t around in the 70s, Hong Kong Phooey is not a breakfast food, but a cartoon.  It wasn’t a major hit, didn’t last long, but my wife Jeannette and I love it.  Check it out on You Tube, especially if you have co-workers who always take credit for other peoples’ work.

   They say misery loves company, but I say pancakes love company. Isn’t that the go-to meals for when the grandkids are over?  And he who loveth not bacon shall be cast out from among you.

   Breakfast memories are of chatter and of reading the back of cereal boxes.  Here’s a quote from gymnast Simone Biles from the back of my Wheaties box:

   “Don’t wait until you’ve reached your goal to be proud of yourself. Be proud of every step you take toward reaching that goal.”

   Last year at holiday time I noticed there was a product called “Christmas Crunch.” Was that in the stores where you live?  Seeing it there on the shelf (the endcap actually)  got me to stop, but not to reach for it.

   If there is a breakfast of champions it’s closer to the Wheaties model than the Cap’n Crunch.

   Here’s some more tasty knowledge about breakfast foods from the website www.interestingfacts.com:

   French toast wasn’t invented in France.

   “Contrary to its name, French toast — sliced bread soaked in milk and beaten eggs and then pan-fried — existed before modern-day France ever took shape. Historians trace the dish to a fourth-century Roman cookbook called Apicius, which describes a recipe similar to French toast called pan dulcis.”

   “Once France coalesced into a nation, the French called the recipe pain a la Romaine (“Roman bread”) before eventually adopting its modern name pain perdu, or “lost bread.” In fact, many countries around the world use a translation of that name, because the dish was originally made with stale bread being saved from going to waste.”

   “North America refers to the concoction as French toast in the same way that fried potatoes are also decidedly “French” — French immigrants popularized both dishes in the 17th and 18th centuries.

  Doughnuts were originally called Oily Cakes.

   “The doughnut made its first appearance in North America in 17th-century New York City, then a Dutch colony known as New Amsterdam. This fried dough recipe was known in Dutch as olykoeks, or “oily cakes.” However, oily cakes were missing one important innovation of the modern doughnut — the hole in the center.”

   “That particular characteristic didn’t take shape until the 19th century. Although there are several competing theories, it’s likely that New England ship captain Hanson Crockett Gregory, spurred on by indigestion due to his mother’s oily cakes, decided to cut out the doughier middle of the cake. Gregory soon discovered that his mother’s cakes received a more even fry, and thus the modern doughnut was born.”

  The first breakfast cereal had to be soaked overnight.

   “The very first manufactured cereal was quite different from the ones we’re used to eating today. In 1963,  a nutritionist named James Caleb Jackson, who ran a health spa and resort in upstate New York, came up with the idea to bake graham flour into brittle, flaky cereal, which he thought would aid in digestion. The one downside of his “granula” concoction was that it had to soak in milk overnight to be edible.”

   “Around the late 1870s, another nutritionist and sanitarium owner, John Harvey Kellogg, created a similar cold cereal concoction using wheat flour, oatmeal, and cornmeal. He also called it “granula.” After a legal battle between these two cereal pioneers, Kellogg changed the name of his invention to “granola,” and, later, patented his invention as Corn Flakes.

  Corn flakes once flew to the moon.

   “Not content with just filling breakfast bowls on Earth, the Kellogg brand exported its Corn Flakes to space as the breakfast of choice for the astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission in 1969.”

   “Fruit-flavored Corn Flakes (as well as Frosted Flakes) were part of the astronauts’ recommended 2,500-calorie daily diet. The cereal was stored in packets, and astronauts needed to add 3 ounces of water before eating them. Corn Flakes were an attractive candidate for space food because they were nutritious, lightweight, compressible, and zero-gravity edible. On early missions, they also needed to go without refrigeration.”

   “Today, the National Air and Space Museum still has packets of unopened Corn Flakes from the Apollo mission in its collection.