Breakfast

I drink smoothies for breakfast every day at home, which puts me at loose ends here, since I don't have a blender.  The first year I drank Greek coffee and ate bread and jam or koulourakia or had yogurt and honey, a contemporary Greek breakfast.  The second year,  I ate a handful of feta and olives for breakfast... a shepherd's breakfast.  The third year I ate a lot of hard boiled eggs... a farmer's breakfast.  This year, I'm enjoying my deconstructed smoothie!

Plums, apricots, nectarines, a cup of tea... that is all I need!

That got me thinking about breakfast.  It is hard to give up your traditional breakfast for one from another culture... it is perhaps too early in the morning to be adventurous.  I'm willing to try most things, but after breakfast, thanks.  When we were in China, I tried to eat only Chinese food, but I couldn't eat congee or what looked like dinner for breakfast. "What do you traditionally eat for breakfast?" is one of my favorite questions when I meet someone from somewhere else.  I am always surprised at the variety.  

Here in Greece I'd always understood that breakfast was not a big thing in Greece, and often skipped.  I'd heard coffee and maybe some kind of cookie to dip.  They sell koulouri (a kind of soft sesame pretzel from Thessaloniki) so that is clearly a very common breakfast on the go, and suggests that people skip breakfast at home.  At the hotels we stayed at in Santorini and Nafplio, they offered a wide variety of things...eggs, ham and cheese, sandwich bread, things that have been on the Greek hotel breakfast menu since at least the 1990s when I was first travelling here, but now there are also savory pies (cheese or spinach), croissants, sweet breads, fresh orange juice, marmalade, honey and jam... as I said in a previous post, WAY better than the tang and toast I remember from hotels in the 1990s.   

I did a little research and discovered that like my different styles of Greek breakfast, there is a wide regional variety.  I stumbled upon this great site written by a Greek American dietician that focuses on food in Greece and includes both the basics for people new to Greece and Greek food and lists of award winning restaurants.  I liked this site that explores breakfasts from Crete, Thessaly, and  the Cyclades. Then I got lost in a Google search that took me to Athens Secret and a traditional "milk bakery" near Omonia that I am now determined to find.  From breakfast to adventure.