Home-Cooked Challenge: What's for Breakfast? First off, let me just say that a wiser person than I would not have paired the "Home-Cooked Challege" with the first week of what I should have dubbed the "free-range summer challenge," the one in which my four children, on the weeks they don't have camp, roam the house, trails and fields while I'm working for three days a week, playing with one another, the animals and the neighbors. It's not that this isn't going well. It's that a) I also added the "I Don't Have an Office Anymore" challenge, in which we remodel the part of the house with the office in it and I work in the kitchen and b) my visible presence serves as a constant reminder that if only I would, I could drive them to the end of the driveway with all their stuff for their lemonade sale, read the words one is struggling with in the book she's reading (every other one) and c) when three children coated head to toe with mud appear in your doorway with the plan of heading upstairs to clean up, I challenge you not to take a minute to get them towels and redirect them to the hose - and so on. And then there's breakfast. What's for breakfast in a house without Pop-Tarts, sugary cereals or packets of oatmeal, when Mom and Dad aren't planning on scrambling some eggs and frying up bacon anytime soon? Toast. Toast is what's for breakfast. Toast and fruit. Toast and a fruit smoothie. Toast and tea. Toast and toast. From which you can interpret that we're still pretty heavily dependent on one prepared food, and that's bread. As it happens, we went to the farmers" market yesterday and picked up two loaves of our favorite fat, squishy oatmeal bread (I'd share the recipe, but he won't give it to me). Earlier in the week, we had bread from another farmers" market, and from the bakery at the restaurant in town, which we ate with butter, with cheese, and once as French toast - but although I love good bread, if all we could get was Pepperidge Farm, I'm sure we'd be eating it by the drawerful. I know many people don't eat bread anymore, but I get that whole "staff of life" business now. Bread is key. Besides some fruits, it's one of the few things that you can eat quickly that doesn't require any preparation (and many fruits are actually quite labor-intensive to serve to four children, or for said children to serve themselves). Broil it in the toaster oven with cinnamon sugar and it's a sweet treat. Switch to cheese, and it's savory. Or just eat it plain. If you are determined to make all your food yourself, there's bread you can make ahead of time and keep. Bread makes peanut butter a meal. (Whole grain? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.) Yogurt, granola, honey and cut-up fruit is a good breakfast, too - but our breakfasts go in stages, and we're not in that stage right now. Muffins? Sounds great, but we haven't made them. Muffins are super-easy - if you haven't recently moved and left behind any canned pumpkin and tossed your stash of frozen over-ripe bananas, and if your hungry, chips-and-cookie-free children haven't eaten all the bananas in the house. (And can I add that I set out to make homemade Pop-Tarts last weekend, for fun - and quickly realized that even a homemade toaster tart has absolutely no redeeming nutritional value at all whatsoever. That's a cookie we're talking about.) So, toast. We're eating toast. What do you and your children have for breakfast on weekdays?