Breakfast Recipes:
Healthy Ways to Start the Day

Many days you don't need breakfast recipes so much as inspiration and ideas. When you get in a rush-out the door rut, it is easy to miss out on healthy breakfast food. But your morning meal (or snack, for many of us) need not be repetitive, nor fast food from a box or drive-thru, nor messy and time-consuming.

Here are some vegetarian stand-bys to fuel you up with brain food for the morning:

Fruit Smoothie
Full of calcium, vitamins, and soluble fiber - and travels well enough to drink on your commute. Caution: evokes sunrises on warm sand beaches.

Yogurt with almonds

A good quality, plain non-fat yogurt is creamy and smooth, and has only 60 calories per half cup. Mix in an ounce of dry roasted almonds, and you've got calcium, protein, cool smoothness, and a satisfying crunch in every spoonful. All for only 200 calories a serving, 1 gram of saturated fat, and 9 grams of natural sugars. A diabetic-friendly choice, excellent candida diet choice, and high fiber (3 - 4 g) as well.

Clif Bar
Can't handle even the simplest breakfast recipes this morning? Clif Bar makes one of the better 'energy bars' - better ingredients, flavor, and nutrition that most of the breakfast bars sold by the cereal companies.

Baked Yams (or Baked Sweet Potatoes)
No need to spend a hour baking, unless you have the oven on for something else, already (then by all means, throw them in).
I scrub a medium size yam or sweet potato, poke it five or six times with a fork, and stick it in the microwave for 2 - 4 minutes (til it is semi-soft, not done).
Then I pop it in the toaster oven for ten minutes or so at about 350 degrees, til it is nice and soft.
Then I either eat it while hot, with butter and salt (yogurt or cream cheese are options, too), or let it cool in the fridge over night and re-heat very briefly in the morning.
Very satisfying on cold mornings; and of course can be eaten for lunch, dinner or a snack, instead.

Vegetarian Breakfast Burrito
Skip the bacon or sausage, and get creative. Warm up a tortilla, and fill it with what you like: a scrambled egg, some cheese, some leftover rice, some black beans for protein, veggies like spinach, red pepper, and/or sauteed onions - play with it. I like salsa and sour cream, and even black olives on mine, as well.

Caffeine Achievers Unite!
and wake up to fair trade. You'll get the biggest jump start from organic fair trade coffee, the next from black or green tea, and a mild amount from a milky cup of hot fair trade chocolate. Unlike most of the ideas and breakfast recipes above, these are hard to find domestically-grown. Start your day right by supporting one of the only forms of global trade certain to benefit the people abroad who worked hard to put that cup in your hand.