Some mornings are over before you’ve worked out what happened.
The alarm went off. You showered. Somebody couldn’t find their shoes. Somebody else remembered something they needed for school, and now you’re staring at the clock wondering how eight minutes disappeared.
Breakfast?
Good luck.
Whether you’re getting kids out the door, squeezing in an early workout or trying to beat traffic to work, breakfast is often the easiest thing to postpone until “later.” A few changes to the morning routine can make it much harder to accidentally skip.
Table of Contents
1. Drink Your Breakfast
Smoothies were made for mornings when sitting down with a plate and fork feels wildly optimistic.
Fruit, yogurt, oats, nut butter and milk can turn into breakfast in a couple of minutes. You can also add ingredients such as spinach without making the whole thing taste like salad, which has obvious advantages if there’s a suspicious six-year-old watching.
For people heading from the gym straight to work, a cordless portable blender makes the idea even easier. Load it before leaving home, keep everything properly chilled where necessary, then blend when you’re ready to eat rather than adding another job to the 6:30 a.m. rush.
One warning from experience: go easy on the spinach the first time.
A bright green smoothie tends to weaken the “there are definitely no vegetables in here” argument.
2. Make The Freezer Do The Morning Shift
I used to think freezing breakfast meant having a box of waffles tucked away somewhere.
Turns out you can freeze almost everything.
Homemade breakfast burritos, muffins, pancakes and individual portions of baked oatmeal can all be prepared ahead, leaving you with little more to do than reheat something in the morning.
Even smoothie ingredients can be portioned into freezer bags ahead of time. Grab one, add your liquid and blend.
Sunday-you has just done Wednesday-you a considerable favor.
3. Put Breakfast Where You Can See It
This sounds almost embarrassingly simple, but mornings aren’t when most of us do our finest thinking.
If breakfast requires opening six cupboards and deciding what you feel like eating, there’s a decent chance coffee wins and food gets forgotten.
Put the easy options somewhere obvious. Keep fruit on the counter, group breakfast foods together in the pantry and leave grab-and-go choices at eye level in the fridge.
Kids are particularly good at finding food when they don’t need to ask where it is.
Use this information wisely.
4. Stop Expecting Breakfast To Look Like Breakfast
There’s no breakfast police.
If your kid happily eats last night’s chicken and rice at 7 a.m., you still fed them.
If you’d rather grab a turkey and avocado wrap than make oatmeal, go for it. Leftover roasted vegetables can go into eggs, while hummus and toast takes about as long to assemble as finding the cereal box.
Once you stop limiting breakfast to traditional breakfast foods, the fridge suddenly becomes considerably more useful.
Cold pizza?
I’m staying out of that argument.
5. Give Yourself A Two-Minute Backup Plan
Even the best morning routine eventually meets a dead phone battery, a missed alarm or a child who announces at 7:42 that today is apparently costume day.
That’s why it helps to have a breakfast that requires virtually no thought.
Maybe it’s yogurt, fruit and a handful of nuts. Perhaps it’s overnight oats already sitting in the fridge, or toast with nut butter and a banana heading out the door with you.
It doesn’t need to be the breakfast you’d photograph.
It needs to be the one you actually eat.
And on those mornings when everyone gets dressed, fed and out the door on time?
Don’t question it.
Just enjoy the ride.
