The Best Foods for a Hearty Breakfast

With ONLY these SIX foods: sausage, bacon, eggs, potatoes, pancakes and biscuits, you can make an infinite number of hearty breakfasts. When I think of "hearty", I think of food that really "sticks to your ribs" served in man-sized portions. Eating a hearty breakfast should give you a considerable amount of satisfaction and you shouldn't be hungry again an hour later. A hearty breakfast should be so tasty that the mere anticipation of it is enough to get you out of bed in the morning. The smell of bacon frying cannot be beat. The great news is that hearty breakfasts start mostly with simple one ingredient foods that are not complicated to make. You will notice that this list starts with sausage and bacon and this is because ALL breakfast items can be accompanied with sausage and bacon even if they are used as ingredients to make other dishes.

You can buy sausage links for a side dish and use ground sausage as an ingredient for breakfast hash, sausage gravy, burritos and any number of other hearty breakfasts. A big time saver would be to buy the precooked sausage links and cut them up to use just as you would use the ground sausage. If you use Bisquick, you can simplify your ingredient list and use it to make both the pancakes and the biscuits. You can speed up preparation time by using frozen potatoes o'brien and frozen hash browns.

Other add-ins (or main) ingredients you can use depending on your family's preferences can be: cheese, beans, onions, peppers, ham, salsa, tortillas, berries, herbs & spices -- and this list can go on ad infinitum.

There are millions of sources to find recipes, so here is a list of menu items to get your hearty breakfast preparations started: green chili breakfast casserole, nutty buckwheat buttermilk pancakes, double berry pancakes, biscuits and sausage gravy, ranchero omelets (w/beans, cheese and salsa), florentine omelets (w/spinach, ricotta cheese and basil), scrambled eggs and cheese, baked eggs, breakfast hash, fried potatoes and breakfast burritos.

If you're not concerned about calories, don't forget to serve real butter and real maple syrup with the pancakes. Don't even worry about the time of day as you will get no complaints for serving a hearty breakfast at dinner time.

Writers Note: Oatmeal is a superb ingredient for a hearty breakfast, but it has been intentionally omitted from this article because this writer does not like it.