Breakfast for Dinner Rocked!

Isn’t having breakfast for dinner fun sometimes? Well that is what we did at the May edition of The Healthy Giraffe Event and we had a blast. It was a historic night as we set a record in attendance with 25 guests. That is 25 guests in the cozy Giraffe Den…wow!!! I am humbled by the size of gathering to say the least.

The theme for the event was the importance of breakfast in our overall diet. We gathered for about thirty minutes before I kicked off with our agenda. The first up was listening to Dr. Helena Kahleova from the Physician’s Committee of Responsible Medicine (PCRM). She is Director of Clinical Research and was a guest on an episode of the PCRM Podcast, The Exam Room, discussing the importance of breakfast and further shared research on timing of eating. The episode is titled, What to Eat and When to Eat.

To gather additional details from that podcast, tips, and what I eat for breakfast, check out my recent blog, Fuel Your Body to Start the Day. We then watched a short video on what several leading plant-based doctors eat for breakfast. It was interesting to see the many similarities and differences. To see their favorites you can watch the video, What Plant-Based Doctors Eat for Breakfast, from the YouTube channel, Plant Based News.

By then we were hungry or at least I was. It was time to see what we were going to make for breakfast (dinner). We had three menu items to prepare. The first was Vegan Scrambled Eggs via The Happy Pear. The second was Blueberry Pancakes also from The Happy Pear. The final menu item was cereal from my own concoction and you can get the details of that from my previous blog I noted earlier. It took about ten minutes to watch the first two videos from The Happy Pear and then three groups went to work to work preparing our meals.

Some of the fun of these events is dealing with chaos and this event presented us with some. The first was fitting 25 people in the Giraffe Den which I LOVED!!! We made it work quite effectively. Then we had three groups in need of space to prepare their assigned menu item. We did have three areas planned and then we had a curveball presented. The large griddle I provided for the pancake group wasn’t working so well. Pancakes were burning up…

On top of that the mix of the egg scramble was looking a bit runny. We moved the pancake group into the kitchen to use the traditional stove top while guests Jodi and Mark brought an induction cooktop just in case we needed it and wow, we needed it. With the help of Linda adding an extra secret ingredient to the egg scramble, it thickened up and was ready for consumption. While that was coming together the pancake team was popping out pancakes left and right. The cereal group prepared all the ingredients so we were ready to eat.

I was a bit anxious about the egg scramble and then Anthony who was standing next to me at the time turned to me unsolicited and said, “these eggs are bad ass.” Yay!!! Before you know it they were gone. I didn’t get to try them myself as they disappeared quickly but the consensus was they were really were good. The pancake group also made an option with chocolate chips in addition to the blueberry version. They were both fantastic!

After we ate it was on to Game Night. This was the third edition and it was in Jeopardy style. I kept the teams in tact from the cooking assignments. The categories included:

Plant-Based Rock Stars (doctors and celebrities making an impact on all things plant-based)
Breakfast is So Good (facts about breakfast … what to eat and what not to)
Living Long & Healthy (learning’s from the Blue Zones … those who live the longest)
Protect our Environment (what we are doing that is destroying our planet and various species)
Dirty Dozen & Clean 15 (information on what foods have the most and least amount of pesticides on or in them…leads to what you better buy organic)
How Not to Die (facts about our leading causes of death and how what we put in our mouth drives those risk factors)

The final Jeopardy question was a tough one – What is the fastest a giraffe can run? The giraffes in the wild can certainly run faster than I…what do you think the speed is?

It was a record breaking night with 25 guests in attendance, all very special to me. It’s not just the size of the group, but more importantly the positive energy of the group that permeated throughout the Giraffe Den all evening. It was loud! I have said it many times…you are who you hang with and I love hanging with this group of positive uplifting people!

Thank you all for making this a special evening: