From breakfast to dinner ...

You have heard a gazillion times that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  Yes?

That is bullshit.

I would argue, based on what I practice, that every meal that we eat is absolutely important.  What we eat, when we eat, and even with whom we eat, together makes sanitas per escam.

First, let's handle the breakfast aspect. You have seen all those images of kids emptying cereals from cartons into bowls, and add milk, right?  Have you ever wondered about the sugar content in those cereals?  Or, people having doughnuts, with all that sugar?  Starting the day with sugar is a very, very, very recent thing in human history:

“The idea that children should have bland, sweet food is a very industrial presumption,” says Krishnendu Ray, a professor of food studies at New York University who grew up in India. “In many parts of the world, breakfast is tepid, sour, fermented and savory.”

Tepid, sour, fermented, and savory.  I think that is how I was described in my last evaluation at work ;)

Back to sugary breakfasts:

Getting children to eat sugar is easy. Teaching them to eat slimy fermented soybeans, by contrast, requires a more robust and conservative culinary culture, one that resists the candy-coated breakfast buffet.

Dinners around the world are varied too.  Even the time that people have dinners.  I am always shocked at how late in the evening that most people in India eat--in this collection, note that the family in India sits down at nine in the night.  Nine, on a weeknight!  And it is not any light meal either:

The family eats around 9 p.m., and on this night, the meal consisted of palak paneer (spinach with cheese), raita, kadai aloo (potatoes with onions and spices), cucumber salad and roasted chapatis.

A carb-heavy dinner that close to bedtime, which is a contrast to my sanitas per escam schedule in which I want to make sure that my stomach is light after all the digestion by the time I head to bed.

After reading what the Nigerian family in that collection had for dinner, I am ready to fly to Nigeria:

Wednesday nights are for wraps at the Sokoh home in Lagos. Ozoz Sokoh, right, a food writer, with her daughter Riobo, flipped freshly made plantain flatbreads, which were served with chicken suya, lime-pickled onions and a tomato and eggplant salsa thawed from the freezer. Dinner included condiments galore, including peanut butter sauce, papaya chutney, hibiscus green chile sauce, mint and spring onion oil, tamarind ginger sauce, and beet and carrot sauerkraut.

The plantain flatbreads are done in the old country too, especially in the cultures along the Malabar Coast.

I loved the Turkish dinner too:

homemade kofte (meatballs), lentil soup and bulgur pilaf with grated tomatoes and bell peppers, along with dolmas (stuffed grape leaves) and red beans in olive oil. They ended the meal with a rice pudding called sutlac and pumpkin with tahini and walnuts.

Sutlac?

Google answers with this image that makes me drool all over:

Source

What do you have cooking for dinner?