Breakfast Al Fresco

Breakfast Al Fresco

   

To be outdoors during the cool of a summer morning is a pleasant way to start the day. After filling the clothes washer and emptying the dishwasher, I sometimes step outside to sit on the side stoop. There I’ll sip a green smoothie or a raspberry smoothie. It’s peaceful at that early hour. Fewer birds sing in late July but I can always depend upon at least a couple songsters. They have their notes down pat and haven’t yet learned the meaning of the musical term finale.
    I ignore our old cars in the driveway (we haven’t a garage at present) and watch the butterflies and bumblebees on the flowers to the left and right of me. Then I putter. I water my potted herbs, pick a ripe tomato or two, before I return to the kitchen to cook some eggs. 

Green Smoothie

In the blender:

A handful of baby spinach or young beet tops

Frozen banana pieces

Fresh orange and/or peach chunks peeled and pitted

Water to cover

Kiwi garnish (not pictured)

Outdoor Memories “Bottled up for After-Refreshment”

     “Never be indoors when you can rightly be without,” is Charlotte Mason’s reminder to us. In Home Education she devotes more than a chapter to tell us why. I find the following paragraph of hers to be particularly persuasive and beautiful. Don’t you? It was not referenced in my chapter on picnics in A Charlotte Mason Companion but it ought to have been. It is so inspiring that I’m certain it was tucked into a back pocket of my mind at the time I was writing.  

    “Besides the gain of an hour or two in the open air, there is this to be considered: meals taken al fresco* are usually joyous, . . . All the time too the children are storing up memories of a happy childhood. Fifty years hence they will see the shadows of the boughs making patterns on the white tablecloth; and sunshine, children’s laughter, hum of bees, and scent of flowers are being bottled up for after refreshment.” (page 42)

*The British adopted the term al fresco from the Italians. It literary means “in the fresh.”

A Special Picnic

 

    At the end of my picnic chapter I mention a lovely coincidence. I came across a story about a special birthday picnic. In Becky’s Birthday, Becky turns ten. My daughter Yolanda was, at that time, about to turn ten. I took joy in handing her the book to read.

    "Yolanda stole away to devour it silently in a corner of the house. Later, I asked her what she thought of Becky’s birthday picnic with the cake floating down the river. She smiled and said, ‘It’s a sweet story but rather exciting. Things don’t happen like that in real life.’ Her eyes widened to learn that the story was a true one. The author and illustrator, Tasha Tudor, used her own children and country lifestyle as a model for her picture books." (page 291)

    By midday it might be too hot where you live for a full-course, white tablecloth picnic, let alone one that is candle-lit and delivered by river, but may I suggest a little family breakfast al fresco? Perhaps an early solitary breakfast and quiet time is needed to refresh your Mother Culture.
    In my story I enjoyed placing Michael and Carol together sitting on the back stoop of Blackberry Inn. Theirs isn’t much of a chat as chats go, but a few unrushed, undistracted moments of husband-and-wife-togetherness at the start of a busy day, is what matters most.