Our Best Breakfast Recipes & Ideas

With fall on the horizon, we find ourselves craving something a little hearty that will carry us through the rest of the day with gusto. Oatmeal is an easy and inexpensive option; let us show you how to make your own instant, ready-in-two-minutes version for work, home, or even on the go!

You may have heard about one-ingredient ice cream, one of our all-time most popular recipes here at The Kitchn. It’s a marvelous trick of a treat, made from frozen bananas that have been whipped furiously into a smooth, dreamy dessert. And yes, it tastes (and scoops) just like soft-serve ice cream.

How do you fry an egg? Do you do it fast, with a smear of butter? Or all bubbly, with lots of olive oil, like the Spanish do? Here’s one basic way to fry an egg — it’s simple and foolproof. Want more smart tutorials for getting things done around the home? See more How To posts We’re looking for great examples of your own household intelligence too! Submit your own tutorials or ideas here!

For a long time we avoided poached eggs out of a misplaced impression that they were extra-difficult or tricky. But they are not! A perfect poached egg is quick, simple, and foolproof. Here’s how we make poached eggs now. Want more smart tutorials for getting things done around the home? See more How To posts We’re looking for great examples of your own household intelligence too! Submit your own tutorials or ideas here!

What are you drinking on Valentine’s? (Or, for that matter, Chinese New Year, President’s Day, or Fat Tuesday?) A little later today we have a roundup for you of creative and delicious Valentine’s Day cocktails. But first, let’s consider breakfast. Why not start the day off with a spiked mocha? Here’s one recipe that looks so good; we’d love to curl up with a hot mug of mocha on this snowy weekend!

Yesterday, we showed you our favorite recipe for light and fluffy pancakes, and several of you shared some great tips and recipes of your own. Now that we have the basics out of the way, let’s move on to the fun stuff – the toppings. Pure maple syrup is never a bad choice, but we’ve grown to love this simple blueberry maple syrup recipe that’s made with just two ingredients. Can you guess what they are?Yep, it’s blueberries and maple syrup. No big mystery there!

A couple weeks ago Amanda Hesser’s Recipe Redux column in The Times Magazine had a recipe for some very unusual pancakes. They flipped the usual pancake recipe ratios upside down and called for two cups of sour cream, four eggs, and only a scant handful of flour to hold it all together. They sounded unusual, and tricky, but Hesser called them “feathery, creamy, tangy.” How could we not try them? A first batch of Heavenly Hots: predictably smushed.

We have been thinking a lot about muffins this week; we often neglect to make muffins, and we wonder why! They are quick, easy, and simple to clean up. They are great little snacks during the day, and they are awesome for grab-and-go breakfasts too. So we were really pleased when reader Elise sent us this tip about a pumpkin chocolate chip muffin recipe.Elise says: I found this delicious recipe for Pumpkin Bread/Muffins at thefreshloaf.com that I wanted to share! They have such a great texture.

I am not exactly sure what most people eat for breakfast on Christmas morning. There is often a lot of talk about dinner: roasts and hams, traditional side dishes, and glittering desserts. But the day has to start somehow; you can’t dig through stockings and unwrap presents on an empty stomach. And it’s Christmas, so it better be special. That means no bowls of cold cereal or skimpy slices of toast.

Did you make Ivy Manning’s Apple Cornbread Dressing with veggie sausageWe aren’t usually fans of vegetarian “meat” products, but we took Ivy’s (and at least one commenter’s) advice and tried the sausages from Field Roast Grain Meat Co. in our stuffing. They were delicious! We used the Smoked Apple Sage variety – perfect flavors for Thanksgiving.

This recipe has been on my mind for a long time — over a year, in fact. It was published right here on The Kitchn as part of a kitchen tour: Devesh and Tara’s Spice Pantry. It just looked so good, bright, and fresh — comfort food for spring. I had to try it myself!I made it for Easter, along with a spiced lamb roast and a creamy cucumber salad. It’s an extremely easy dish to make. In fact, it only takes about 20 minutes from start to finish. (A true breakfast dish!

Here is a very, very last-minute food gift that takes literally five minutes to make, and yet everyone you share it with will love it (and you). Too good to be true? No — it’s just chocolate-dipped pretzels.The other very nice thing about this pretzel project is that it is quite inexpensive. All you need are pretzel rods, chocolate chips or another chocolate good for melting, and some sprinkles or coarse sugar.Here are a few tips for making these salty-sweet treats.

I was sick with a bad cold over the weekend and although I was raised a WASP in midwestern USA, when I’m down for the count I usually cook up a big pot of congee, perhaps one of the most ubiquitous of all Asian foods.In my experience, there’s nothing simpler and more comforting than congee, which is basically rice cooked with a lot of liquid until it forms a soft and creamy porridge.

We’re not exactly going to win a medal for figuring this one out, but still. We’ve eaten this simple, creamy, peppery dish several times at Cafe Gitane in New York City (for breakfast as well as an appetizer at dinner) and finally made it at home…We don’t know the restaurant’s exact preparation, but the bread is always a thick, nutty whole grain and there’s a kicker — a big sprinkling of red pepper flakes over the top of the mashed-up avocado.

You may remember our last attempt at this jam, when it turned out a wee bit hard. But because the flavor was so good, and because we were determined not to let the jam win, we gave it another try…This time, we made a couple of changes. We peeled the peaches, making the jam a little paler than our last batch.

Okonomiyaki is a savory Japanese pancake-like dish that is very easy to prepare at home, and makes a good “ clean the fridge” meal as many different types of meat, vegetables, and seafood can be added to it.The “base” ingredients for okonomiyaki can be found at your local Japanese grocery store or online.

During the week, I’m often too busy to cook breakfast, but as the weekend approaches, I start making mental menus for Saturday and Sunday morning. Freshly brewed coffee, fruit salad, toast with jam, fresh-squeezed juices, frittatas, pancakes with maple syrup, crabcakes Benedict with hollandaise …Hollandaise is one of my most favorite sauces ever, and it is ridiculously easy to make.

Photo by Allen of Eating Out LoudWe love spaetzle and we often make our airy, tender Ricotta Spaetzle for dinner. We’ve never thought of them as breakfast food, but now we suddenly do…Spaetzle are tiny German dumplings – not much more than flour, eggs, and water. They can be made orzo-tiny by pushing the batter through a ricer or special spaetzle-maker. Or they can be made, as we prefer them, by pushing thumb-sized lumps of batter off the end of a teaspoon.

Plums are in season, and we have been busy thinking up more ways to use them. We were inspired by Heidi Swanson’s Rosewater Plum Compote a couple weeks ago, and we set out to make our own plum sauce. We love tea and plums together, so we played around with an Earl Grey concentrate and sweet-tart red plums until we found a combination we liked. The tea gives the sweet plums undertones of tannins and herbs, and these deep flavors ripen as it sits.

Eggs on toast are go-to comfort food, a meal to be eaten alone on a spring evening, standing up in the kitchen, or on the couch with a book. When all else fails, there’s always eggs and buttery toast. Here’s one of our favorite ways to spruce up the old standby with a smattering of grownup flavors – briny, juicy capers, fragrant rosemary, and a dash of Romano cheese.

We made pancakes last weekend, a hearty Saturday brunch for a crowd. We are great fans of maple syrup, but we also love the chunky fruit toppings found in diners and family restaurants like Bob Evans. You can buy these industrially pre-packaged in jars, of course, but it is just too easy to make your own. You don’t even need fresh fruit; frozen does just as well, and bags of organic frozen peaches and blueberries are easily available from Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods.

It is finally snowing here in New York City! And Florida grapefruit are at their peak now. This is the perfect morning to pucker up, keep warm in front of the oven, and make yourself a sunny broiled grapefruit for breakfast.

Jam looks intimidating – boiling and canning and sterilizing and botulism all rolled into one specter of potential food poisoning. But while canning itself is much easier than it looks, you don’t need to mess with that for just one or two quick jars of jam. An hour or two will give you a jar of jam that can be frozen for up to six months or refrigerated for a month with that taste of summer fruit locked inside.