Friday treats

However lovely your new flat is, and however much you love your work, there will always be grumpy weeks.  Not bad, not unhappy, just meh to the core.  I have different tactics - secret weapons that keep my head above water until the sun comes out again – and today I am going to share one with you.

In a mood slip-slide, getting up later creeps in and soon breakfast is off-menu.  Instead it is a coffee and pastry at the desk, and then after a while, even this doesn't seem exciting.  The only thing to do is get a grip and re-invent breakfast.

On a practical level, eating breakfast makes your morning 70% better*.  You have more energy, you are less grumpy, and less likely to eat only cake and flake bars for the rest of the day.  On an emotional level, this is one of the few times I feel again the thrilling, unsurpassable anticipatory excitement of Christmas Eve.  

A few weeks back I decided to celebrate Friday breakfast.  The night before I assembled all the dry ingredients for savoury muffins, so that the next morning (bouncing out of bed super-early with excitement) I just had to bung in the wet ingredients, scoop the batter into muffin cases and pop them in the oven.  At the same time I put a tray of chipolatas in to cook.  

Breakfast cooked itself whilst I had a shower and made tea, and then the lucky gent had breakfast in bed.  And I had a Friday morning feast which put a spring back in my step.

How to

The muffins are based on the recipe in Nigella Bites: I fiddled about with the flour a bit, but stuck more faithfully to the recipe than usual. 

I used chipolatas as they cook quickly, giving time for them to cool to a handling-temperature, whilst the muffins had their last 10 minutes in the oven.  I used sausages from the 'Good little' company, which I hadn't heard of before; I loved the idea behind them... and they were tasty, too.

*Recently invented statistic.