Miss Pycella talks about breakfast! Have some right here!
The Green Dragon Friday lecture series continues, this time with a talk about breakfasts! Miss Pycella held this one Friday April 21 2017. This was also an “interactive” lecture, in the sense that the listeners got all materials so they could get the “Breakfast connoisseur” title. Let’s just say there was a steady soundtrack of munching throughout the lecture. It almost drowned out the flute-player in the yard below (the lecture had to be given given on the roof, since the rooms below were filled with folks looking for silly magical floating remembrance books for the anniversary scavenger hunt).
Please let me know if you’d like to sign up for a lecture yourself! Green Dragon Friday is a hobbit roleplaying event held on the LOTRO Laurelin server, every Friday between 2:30PM – 4:30PM servertime. Format-wise, GDF lectures should last no more than 10-15 minutes when delivered by in-game text messages in /say chat. This means that the lectures are rarely exhaustive treatments, but rather quick talks to whet the audience’s appetite to topics of hobbit interest.
Lecture on breakfasts
Hullo all and welcome to enjoy a tasty lecture on breakfasts! Now, I know that giving a lecture on breakfasts for a roomful of hobbits is probably the most unnecessary thing ever. This is just an excuse to eat and think it’s all for a noble cause. Studying… getting wiser… and growing your waistband size.
(Meanwhile, Pycella starts handing out the study materials: 9 rations of eggs and onions, 9 complete hobbit breakfasts, 9 rations of crispy bacon and 9 Hobbiton omelettes.)
Now, time for the lecture. First, the definition of breakfast! The word derives from “breaking a fast”… In other words, you start to feast after restraining yourself from eating for a whole night! What a sign of discipline. The breakfast is usually the first meal of the day. Or the two, or three meals before elevenses. It has been a long night, after all. And as everyone knows, mornings get bad if you don’t eat enough.
But when it comes to the contents of a breakfast, folks tend to go separate ways. But I guess most hobbits agree on this: the breakfast must be filling, comforting, and easy to prepare. I have already handed out some good breakfast examples. Let’s go through your study materials now.
So, when you wake up hungry, you want to have something simple and fast. That’s when the eggs and onions pop into your mind. You grab the ingredients from your larder and toss them into the frying pan. Soon, you sit down and enjoy your classic breakfast.
(Everyone eats their eggs and onions at this stage. Loud munching noises from the audience.)
But it is a bit simple, and you have scoffed it too fast, so you have just gotten hungrier. And the onions might irritate your tummy a bit. You start thinking what to eat next… and then you remember it: the Complete Hobbit Breakfast! It has everything: mushrooms, pork, taters and eggs, of course. The taters present the vegetables in this dish, for keeping things healthy. Some fried and seasoned mushrooms complete the dish nicely. But the king of this breakfast is the pork, without a doubt.
(More munching noises, as folks study the complete Hobbit breakfasts.)
After you have finished with this meal, you are hungry for more pork. That’s when you return to the frying pan and make Delicious Crispy Bacon. Now, you can’t get closer to heaven with this food. The bacon is so crispy it’s almost burnt. When it lands on your tongue, it melts instantly! That way, you can keep eating for a long while and cherish the flavour.
(People digest the study materials quickly.)
However, your tastebuds long for something different. At that moment, the clucking noises from your personal chicken coop bring your thoughts back to eggs! So you run towards the coop, pick a few eggs and head back to the kitchen. But you slip on a misplaced bacon on the way back, and break the eggs. But all hope is not lost! You gather the broken eggs and put them on a pan. You toss some green onions there, so no one will notice the grass that ended up in the eggs on the floor. You can also add some sharp cheese and spices to the eggs, to cover any strange flavours. So there you have it: the famous Hobbiton omelet!
(The sounds of studying intensify, someone is cheering for their own accomplishment.)
After eating all these different breakfasts nine times each, you’ll be a Breakfast Connoisseur! I really worked hard to pronounce that word correctly. Of course, we have skipped a lot of fine breakfasts here, as the night is far too short for all of them. Some of us might add biscuits, seed cakes, bread with jam, muffins and porridges to their morning meals.
To wrap things up, I just give a few tips concerning breakfasts:
First tip: wake up early. Why? Because then, you’ll have time to eat more.
Second: Don’t you ever, never name your meal. Miss Almi once named an egg, and she got so attached to it that she couldn’t eat it… So then it hatched, clucked off and ran all the way to faraway lands.
Third: only use eggs from chickens, ducks or other fairly harmless birds. Don’t use dragon eggs!
Fourth: make sure that you are in a company where you don’t end up as breakfast as yourself. This sometimes happens in the faraway lands.
Fifth: If you are a beginner and your belly can’t take it all, there is something that can help you… A potful of strong coffee. Drink that coffee as black as midnight on a moonless night. That’s some dang good coffee! Eat some cherry pie with it, if you must. As you know, coffee will boost your internal breakfast processing system. It might speed up things in a way that you can eat even more.
Good luck with your post-breakfast studies as well!
Youtube Version
Master Skepto recorded the lecture too. Thanks! Yer can see it below:
Pycella’s breakfast lecture