The best breakfasts come from not planning any at all.
Text and Photo © JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro 2012
It’s been just about three weeks since the winter solstice here in the northern hemisphere. Where I sit along the Swedish west coast, the days get longer by about two minutes each passing day, the sun still rising at about 08:45 hrs in the morning and setting still before 16:00 hrs, at least for another week or so.
06:00 hrs on a Saturday morning, with a click of a mouse, I pull up daily news from CNN, the BBC, the New York Times, Svenska Dagsbladet, Corriere della Sera, China Daily etc. and find myself browsing information on the continuing Euro crisis, the civil unrest in Syria, the cruise ship Costa Concordia running aground in Italy, Taiwan’s exciting but tense upcoming elections as Beijing watches hawk-eye etc. Through all those bits of news I realize how it is sometimes difficult to fathom the very idea of happiness.
Ketamined from the news, you sit back, take a deep breathe and find yourself confronted with what seems like life’s utmost fundamental existential questions – Who am I? What am I? Why am I here? and What’s for breakfast?
What to do to perk up? Why, turn to the pages of Harvard Business Review, of course. They seem to have all of life’s philosophies worked out in short columns and snippets that have the effect of double espresso shots for the mind. This morning my two favourites were:
The Swedish Farmer’s Pie or bondepaj is much like the Italian pizza rustica with un-crimped pastry edges, a mixture of at least three different cheeses and likewise as many varieties of sausages and meat cuts. Some half an hour in the oven and you’ll have a most savoury breakfast served!
Segovia and Conant were both chirpy and optimistic in their own ways. The articles provided excellent reads and I did indeed follow suite with Conant’s thinking, “How can things get better?” Where I am quite sure the answer to that question was certainly neither authors’ idea of where I should begin, but nonetheless, a look into the refrigerator happily revealed that a Swedish Farmer’s Pie would be within reach given some 40 minutes of preparation, much like the Italian Pizza Rustica it is savoury, rich and takes little effort and time for the stupendous results!
And true to Plato’s philosophy that the ultimate reality is the ideal and it is from there that the material precipitates, as if by magic, it was bondepaj at the table this morning. That, accompanied by a hot cup of caffè con panna, defined a happy Nordic breakfast.
As a side note, while being at it, it is actually easy to just enlarge the batch and create a hearty lunch for any late sleeper in the family eventually pulled in by the seductive aroma of my version of caffè con panna – freshly brewed ground coffee beans, laced with some cocoa, cardamom and a light dusting of cinnamon.
With the quick glances of distraction observed from tourists and a slight quickening of their pace past the local lunch scene at Yuyuan in Shanghai, where the local people seemed perfectly at east sitting along the roadside with their bowl of rice in one hand and chopsticks in the other, eating whilst waiting for their next customer to walk into the shop, I understood with clearing clarity that for most of Northern Europe, dining was a much more formal affair around a set table. 
