Breakfast is the meal where people give up fastest. There is no bread, so there is nothing, and the day starts with something bought at a station. In practice a nearly empty kitchen contains several breakfasts, and most of them take less time than queuing does.
If there is an egg
Fried hard at the edges, on anything: rice, yesterday’s potatoes, a slice of bread, a pile of leftover vegetables. A fried egg makes almost any cold thing into a meal. Or scrambled slowly with whatever cheese-end exists. Or boiled, salted, and eaten with bread and a tomato. The egg is the single most useful thing in an empty kitchen.
If there is bread, even stale
Toast with oil and salt is a real breakfast, especially with a tomato crushed onto it. Toast with whatever is in the fridge on it is a better one. Stale bread makes French toast with one egg and a splash of milk, which is the best available use for the end of a loaf and takes four minutes.
If there is neither
Last night’s dinner is breakfast. This is normal in most of the world and strange only where breakfast has been defined as a separate category of food. Rice, beans, soup, roast vegetables — all of them are better in the morning than something from a wrapper. Otherwise: yoghurt with anything sweet or crunchy, oats cooked with water and salt and finished with whatever fruit is going soft, or a tin of beans on toast.
Three things that make breakfast possible
Eggs, oats and frozen bread. Between them they cover almost every morning, cost very little and do not go off in the time it takes you to forget about them. Add a jar of something sharp — pickle, chilli, jam — and even the plainest of the three becomes something you actually want.
Decide the night before, not at seven in the morning
The reason breakfast fails is that it is decided at the worst possible moment by someone who is late. Thirty seconds the night before — soaking oats, setting out a pan, slicing bread from the freezer — removes the decision entirely. That is the same principle as keeping three no-decision dinners: the work is not the cooking, it is choosing, and choosing is best done when you are not in a hurry.
An egg, a slice of stale bread or last night’s rice will all make a better breakfast than anything bought on the way. Keep eggs, oats and frozen bread in, decide the night before, and the meal stops disappearing.