Early Morning Sustenance

School is fully underway with a few changes to our schedule. This year Jeff is teaching an A hour class that begins at 6:40 a.m. and I'm working in the credit recovery program that gears up at 6:50 each morning. These early demands mean we have to be out the door by 6 a.m. instead of our usual 7 a.m. I'm not really a morning person these days, so the thought of getting up an hour and a half before leaving just didn't set well with me. (Normally we arose at 5:30 and left at 7.) So we decided that streamlining the morning routine would allow us to back up the alarm by only half an hour and still leave on time.

One place we've had to give a little time is breakfast. Traditionally, I made a quick breakfast of scramble eggs and toast or oatmeal with fruit, but the one hour time frame doesn't accommodate those tasks. To make sure breakfast is available on demand, I've begun making a week's worth on Sunday afternoon. The first week I stuck with tried and true - sausage and egg biscuits. My original intent was to buy a box of these little beauties in the freezer section and nuke them at will. However, when I saw the price (several dollars for two!) I decided to make my own, which turned out better than bought because I could add a little strawberry jelly to the biscuits providing something sweet to offset the spicy sausage patties. I also discovered that wrapping the sandwiches in parchment paper before stashing them in a plastic container in the fridge made them easier to pop in the microwave and carry out to the car for mobile consumption.

Last week I branched out a bit and made pigs-in-a-blanket breakfast style. I used sausage links and a couple cans of cinnamon rolls for the process, which was as easy as wrapping the coils of dough around two small turkey links before baking them in the oven. In the morning 20 seconds in the microwave made them perfectly edible.

This week I'm trying yet another variation. (My plan is to have at least five kinds of "sandwiches" through which I can rotate.) I began by popping 10 frozen waffles in the oven. (This ensured they were crispy and flat instead of soggy.) While these baked and cooled, I beat a softened package of cream cheese with a good deal of fig jam. (I just kept adding and tasting until I liked the balance.) Next, I spread the mixture (which would also be a great cake filling) on the waffles, being sure to fill all the little squares. After adding some thinly sliced ham (or use turkey breast) to five of  the waffles,  I covered them with the remaining waffles. Next, I cut all the sandwiches in half and wrapped them to create 10 breakfast goodies. I haven't warmed one up in the microwave yet, but the filling sure was good with a little left over ham. (Actually, I could see using this filling to create yummy appetizers like stuffed dates or ham rolls, or just eating it on a toasted English muffin.)

The goal, of course is to still have time for a decent breakfast even though we're starting our days earlier. After all, food is life.

Looking for a Label

During back-to-school shopping today we purchased new dress shirts for Jeff, glasses and contacts for Jade, and a few jewelry trinkets to enhance my wardrobe. Try as we might, we had a difficult time buying American-made goods in these categories. 


The only products we came home with that I'm certain were produced in the United States are the boy's contact lenses. Some online research this morning (before we left) indicated that many of today's disposable brands come from American facilities. Bausch and Lomb (founded in 1853), Johnson and Johnson (maker of my brand - Acuvue), and Cooper Vision all make their products in the U.S. of A. CIBA Vision, a company based in Switzerland, also has production facilities here as well as many other countries around the world. Thus, I knew we had scored one for the red, white, and blue when we left the house. However, the new glasses were another story entirely.


My online research yielded many companies that manufacture and distribute glasses frames and lenses, but most did not specify brand names. To compound the situation, the companies I read about also imported some brands and distributed those alongside their own products. Italy seems to be an especially popular country for eye wear exports to the U.S. In addition, none of the frames we looked at were marked with a specific company or country, (mostly because we didn't buy designer frames). Our assumption is that these frames were not created here, though we did purchase the glasses and contacts from Eye Masters, a private corporation based in San Antonio. (The company is a subsidiary of Eye Care Centers of America, which was founded in Texas in 1988.) 


We finished glasses shopping feeling we had done our best to buy American, though we didn't really have enough information to guide us or enough choices to make the option feasible. Next, we spent some of our dollars on lunch at Panda Express (an American company that originated in California in 1973) and Steak Escape (an Ohio company founded in 1982). Both of these fast food joints are available at our local mall which, of course, employs our neighbors and students. 


Next came shirt shopping for Jeff, but this portion of our day yielded zero satisfaction in the American-made department. Every dress shirt we looked at in J.C. Penney, Macy's, Dillard's, and Kohl's was made elsewhere - Taiwan, China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. (At Kohl's I decided to browse through the women's clothes as well, but I couldn't find anything made in the U.S.A. - not even the Levi's which came from Mexico or Indonesia depending on the style. Lee jeans didn't present a better choice either, since they, too, came from overseas. As a matter of fact, every major jeans brand I looked at was made somewhere other than America - including Kenya, Egypt, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Costa Rica.) Eventually, the necessity of having decent dress shirts for work won out over our frustrated endeavors to buy U.S. goods, but we felt a little guilty leaving the store with a sack full of garments manufactured in another country.


Finally, we purchased a few other small products including a clip-on lamp for Jeff's classroom and a couple of bracelets / earrings as accessories. Again, we couldn't locate American made options in our local stores. This is not to say they don't exist, but if stores where we shop don't carry something made in the U.S.A., it is much more difficult to purchase it. We don't always have the luxury of ordering online or devoting an hour or two to researching brand names. Overall, I feel like we're in the midst of a consumer Catch-22 because we want to support the economy by purchasing needed goods, but we don't want to send our money to another country. In addition, more people would buy American goods if they were easily available, but not enough people bought them at some point so they're no longer on local shelves. Ultimately, we'll keep trying to buy items made in America, but the frustration is taxing.