rashers and eggs

Bacon, in the U.S. 

The photograph is purposefully unimaginative because the breakfast is so. 

I'll make this breakfast once in a while, and it always makes me a little bit sad. I saw this thousands of times, sometimes with link sausages, and I took it as perfectly ordinary. If there is any truth to the axiom you are what you eat then dear ol' Dad will be 30% bacon, eggs, toast, and coffee. This is the breakfast Mum made for Dad every single morning for as long as I remember, I suppose since the day they married. Eventually that changed but not until I had already moved from home. I honestly do not know if this is a military thing or or a British thing, or possibly even a universal thing. I doubt it arose naturally from the distaff side. Given the plethora of available breakfasts, that anyone would insist on the exact same thing day after day, year upon year, for decades, to an impressively stultifying rut, why, it boggles the mind. 

We kids, however, were different than that. We got going after Dad had already left for work. We would dip our buttered toast into mugs of hot chocolate. A bowl of sugar was kept mixed with cinnamon to coat the toast, and if you imagine a gang of kids would not make a fine mess of that then you do not know kids at all. We lost many a toast corner into the chocolate for being too slow on the withdrawal so each mug would become infused with soggy toast corners and increasingly sweetened with dissolved cinnamon sugar until the final sips of tepid chocolate were supersaturated with sugar and 50% wet bread corners falling apart and glistening with a slick of butter and re-flavored with cinnamon. Then we'd drink the lumpy liquid like a wet chocolate bread pudding. Ew. If not that, we'd pour milk over dry cereal, multiple boxes of the most saccharine types available, and all boxes at once, switching between boxes continuously, passing the boxes between us, spilling their contents. Sometimes buttered oatmeal cooled with milk and sweetened to a state of near candy. Looking back at it, we were terrible sugar-hyped little bastards revving up each morning, and the dinning room floor had to be sweep two or three times each day.

This is the bread made yesterday. I am compelled to point out something that no bread baker would miss. The baguette was not slashed as bread loaves are supposed to be and that created a problem that is all too typical and easily avoided by slashing.  You can see where the upper portion of the crust lifted away from the crumb due to the formation of a large bubble directly beneath the layer of crust. This is the airplane hanger effect easily avoided by cuts made into the dough before baking. This loaf would have been greatly improved by just a few deft decorative shallow slashes. And that goes to show you conclusively ... um ... something about rules or common practices or something.