As I heard yesterday from a commenter, breakfast can be a tricky meal. How does one get enough protein when eating gluten-free and egg-free and also when trying to avoid the monetary expense of purchasing sausage and/or turkey bacon each day? I will share our breakfast choices, in the hope that it will be a help. I am also hoping that others will chime in and share solutions that work for their families.
For breakfast, we are pretty boring in that we eat pretty much the same thing every day. However, we are not boring in the sense that our breakfasts are filling, nutritious and delicious! The main breakfast dish around here is Four-Grain Breakfast Cereal, which includes the gluten-free grains of millet, quinoa, amaranth and teff. The amaranth and quinoa offer complete amino acid profiles, which means that all the amino acids required to make a complete protein are present. What it doesn’t mean is that they are present in the same ratio. However, one can get complete protein from this grain dish, which is a great benefit. In addition to adding nuts to the porridge, we pour nut milk over it, which adds more protein to the meal. My husband is sensitive to overloads of sugars from carbohydrates and does very well with this meal.
A favorite breakfast choice of the kids is to make the batter-style flatbreads, but substitute 1/2 cup of garbanzo bean/fava bean flour (or a combination) for one of the flours. The breads can be toasted and topped with nut or seed butters and fruit-sweetened jam or honey. The bean flour combines with the grain flour to make a complete protein and obviously, the nut/seed butters add protein as well.
Please add your ideas for boosting protein in breakfast without relying on eggs, dairy, or meats.
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Thanks Wardee!
I will try this and let you know how it goes. Typically if I don’t eat protein at breakfast, I begin “blacking out” as the day goes on. Maybe because these options include complete protein it will work for us though! It sure would save us some money…
And here’s a blog post I found about yeast cleanses. I see a Naturopathic Doctor fairly regularly, and he’s the one who helped my husband. Finding a good ND where you are would probably be very helpful, but here’s a start: http://sassifer.wordpress.com/2007/11/02/candidayeast-cleanse/
Sara, thank you for the yeast cleanse link! We have an okay ND around here. I would be tempted to go about it myself. 😉
I really, really hope the breakfast options will help you. You will be the “canary” so to speak. Please do let me know how it goes for you, whether or not it works. I don’t want you to black out! My husband is very sensitive to “crashing” (his words) and he hasn’t crashed after breakfast for the longest time!
This has been a challenge for my family. We follow the diet plan of Dr. Schwarzbein (www.schwarzbeinprinciple.com), and she explains the reasons why it’s important to eat protein and carbohydrates (and veggies too), together. We used to eat eggs every day along with our breakfast carb, but decided we needed more variety. We’ve found that the typical American breakfast is very carb-heavy. We haven’t found a cheap way to have protein every morning, so we’ve resigned ourselves to spending the extra money to eat protein for breakfast. Our breakfast proteins change daily. Here are some examples: chicken burgers (from Trader Joe’s), natural and nitrate free sausage, salmon patties, fish sticks made with red snapper, and eggs. People sometimes think we’re crazy for eating fish at breakfast, but it really doesn’t seem strange or weird anymore now that we’ve been doing it for so long. We also eat vegetables every morning to accompany our carbs and proteins.
The Four-Grain Breakfast Cereal looks so delicious! That would work well for our family as our carb, but we would still need a more substantial protein to go along with it. I’m especially sensitive to carb amounts since there is diabetes in my family. Dr. Schwarzbein writes a lot about avoiding insulin spikes. Eating a good protein along with my carb helps to avoid such spikes.
So, I guess I didn’t follow your instructions for posting ideas not including eggs, dairy or meats, but I just haven’t found a way to boost the protein otherwise unless I’m also boosting the carbs even more.