weekend breakfast

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You think you want something light for breakfast, just a snack, such as beads of dark berries in a tablespoon of plain yogurt, or a half cup of Grape Nuts in milk. When you were a girl you doused Grape Nuts in a whole teaspoon of white sugar, like snow on the Jungfrau. As with global warming and other transformations, your Grape Nuts have lost their snow, but you still like a small breakfast.

But on Saturday, you must be ravenous after sleeping in until 6, because the farmer-farmhand-farmer’s-wife-man has a contractual agreement with the Farm Guild that he will cook you a big, hot breakfast, the kind his Aunt Alvaretta cooked when he bunked a week at her farm as a kid, the kind that requires you to be gurneyed from the table on a farm wagon. Friday evening he gathered 18 eggs from his hens, and in the morning as soon as it was light he found 20 fresh morels in the woods and then punched out a dozen biscuits that smelled up the house like the homes of story books. If the man had his way, you'd also have had pork sausages from pigs he raised, minced with herbs from your herb bed. As it was, a quiche full of ham and veggies just out of the oven was firming up on top of the stove.

You're still learning the Farm Manual and haven't gotten to the part yet about whether throwing scraps of quiche to the chickens contributes to cannibalism, but you just can't eat all this food so early. After 3? Oh yes, you can eat this much and more then.