One of my big New Year’s resolutions is to eat more breakfast in 2011.  Seventeen days into the new year, I’m happy to report that it’s going awesome sort of okay. Except not.

I ate breakfast twice in the last two weeks. Good news first: that’s two hundred percent more breakfast than I ate in 2010. Now the bad news: one of those breakfasts occured at dinner time. (Remember that yummy apple pancake cake  last week?) And the other breakfast came from McDonald’s. I ate it in my car. Not only did it taste terrible, I felt guilty and irritable after I ate it. This is not the food-positive breakfast journey I was hoping for at the beginning of the year!

A lot of my breakfast frustrations boil down to the same issues that plague all struggling home cooks: I’m short on time and know-how.  In the past year, I’ve become great at improvising healthy dinners, but I’m still a newbie when it comes to from-scratch breakfast recipes. And while I’m a pro at menu-planning, the strategies that help me keep dinners organized are too rigid for my feeble, groggy mind to employ at breakfast.

So. I don’t have a lot of breakfast solutions yet, but I’m hoping that this third week of the new year will be easier than the last two. Tonight I’m going to make a batch of apple cheddar muffins for grab-and-go breakfasts. I’m also planning to make some steel cut oats in the crockpot. I tried making steel cut oats over the winter break with crunchy results, but I’m willing to give it another go if that means I can eat breakfast this week. At the very least, I’ll feel less angst about crunchy oatmeal than I would over another McSausage Biscuit.

I’ll let you know how things go. In the meantime, what are your strategies for eating breakfast in the morning?