Today was the 70th birthday celebration for a relative of my husband’s. I have been looking forward to this party for a few weeks, since the invitation came and we discovered that the party would be held at a local diner, with breakfast-for-dinner as the menu.
When I was a kid, Breakfast For Dinner was always such an unexpected treat, as good as when I would come home from school to find two sticks of butter softening in my mother’s old brown stoneware bowl, signaling that chocolate chip cookies were in my immediate future. There’s just something about eating pancakes and maple sausage for dinner that is just the right amount of subversive for a weeknight in childhood.
As an adult, Breakfast For Dinner is always marked with an exclamation point on our refrigerator whiteboard where our weekly menu plan is found. It deserves special punctuation. The Bisquick pancakes and Aunt Jemima (well, store-brand version of Aunt Jemima) syrup from my youth has been replaced with homemade blueberry pancakes, or french toast with sauteed apples or peaches served with real Rhode Island maple syrup, but the spirit is just the same as it was back then.
To serve breakfast for dinner as party food is pretty inspired. Sitting at the little tables in the train car diner, enjoying Eggs Benedict while my son ate his way through a pancake twice the size of his head, I told my husband that I wanted this type of celebration for my 70th birthday. Or, maybe my 32nd.
So, Fabulous Thing #100 (!): Breakfast! For! Dinner!
