My husband and I traded off who pulled themselves out of bed at 6 a.m. on weekdays to get our kids ready for school. While I believe they preferred my packed lunches, because I was careful not to let the foods touch and always included a sweet, I know they fancied Andy’s breakfasts over mine because he arranged the food into funny faces on their plates. Bacon or sausage link mouths, sliced apple ears, toast haircuts, mandarin orange segment eyebrows, strawberry noses, and banana slice eyes dotted with gummy vitamin pupils kept Owen and Eliza smiling as they ate their well-balanced morning meal.
Market research, mostly commissioned by national chains that serve breakfast all day, has a lot to say about how breakfast makes Americans happy. I’ve read reports where more than half of the respondents say breakfast is their favorite meal, 40% say eggs are the best breakfast food, a third say they take a second breakfast at least once a week, and a significant percentage advocate for recognizing breakfast food as an official genre in the lexicon of American cuisine.
While I’m not exactly sure how to establish any food genre as official, that statistic was indeed the impetus for edible MAINE’s first-ever breakfast issue. To that end, we set out to highlight many of Maine’s agricultural and culinary endeavors involved in getting breakfast to the table.
Writer Karen Watterson took one for the team and ate her fill of classic breakfast items in restaurants around the state to ascertain which dozen offer a particularly fetching spin. Derek Bissonnette’s photographs of Broad Arrow Farm butcher Anna Hymanson clearly demonstrates her love of breakfast meat. And we feature the happy heifers who get milked before the sun comes up on Wolfe Neck Farm in Freeport.
Veteran journalist and coffee fiend Kathleen Pierce provides an overview of Maine’s ever-growing coffee scene, while regular contributor Rosie DeQuattro and photographer Kelsey Kobik showcase one of Maine’s most acclaimed bakers, Barak Olins, in his new micro-boulangerie in Portland’s West End.
We provide tips on how to best balance flavors in a schmear and attempt to answer questions about the proper schmear-to-bread ratio in any bagel situation. We also serve up recipes for elevating toast into a complete meal, mixing up brunch mimosas that switch out the OJ and switch up the bubbly, and preserving local eggs for later use.
While none of the photos in this issue contain happy faces made from breakfast foods, I promise you that there is still a lot to make you smile about eating breakfast in Maine.
Cheers,
Christine
