How to get 4 glasses of water in at breakfast, hot, hot, hot!

My poor husband has a rotten cold (which he had better keep to himself), so I cooked breakfast this morning. He usually cooks breakfast, bless his heart. I made coffee and I decided to make two of his favorites: oatmeal and hash browns with eggs in them.

First I open my bottle of water and start sipping. I measure out the oatmeal into each bowl, heat the almond milk and pour that over the cereal while I make the rest of breakfast. So far, so good. I see I have a whole already baked potato in the frig. Yeah! Oh, there's half a cup of leftover carrots, I'll use those, too. I weigh the potato and measure the carrots and I'm on a roll. Love those already chopped onions and peppers that I can just throw in the pan and get them cooked real fast. Then I start adding spices: whole cumin seeds (probably won't add those again), fresh ground black pepper, garlic powder, cumin, and, ah, chipotle powder. Throw in the potatoes and carrots and a tablespoon of margarine. (I didn't add any salt and I noticed my husband had to salt his.)

My husband loves to just add eggs to this. I'm not so thrilled with eggs in the potatoes, but he's sick and I'm making this for him, so I measure in my half cup of egg beaters for the two of us and stir them in for scrambled eggs with the potatoes. Confession here, I don't like hash browns. I'm not fond of fried foods and hash browns can be pretty greasy. Of course, I didn't add any oil and I added the margarine in order for the potatoes to brown just a little. And I didn't forget the oatmeal. I put the oatmeal in the microwave for a minute so it will finish cooking, then put it on the table. There's my hash browns with eggs all ready to go, so I weigh the whole thing, split it in two and serve it. It was pretty good, but HOT, really spicy HOT, HOT.

I'd been sipping my bottle of water, well, I finished that one and drank another! Here's a tip: oatmeal helps to put out the fire of overly spicy food! My husband loved breakfast and his only comment was: "And you complain when I (emphasis on the I) put too much spice in food!?! What can I say?