Essentials Week spotlights unexpected items that make our daily lives just a little bit better.
Breakfast, they say, is the most important meal of the day. So important, in fact, that I fail to prepare for it on an almost daily basis.
Since pivoting to working from home during the pandemic, I have come face to face with some of my most irritating personality traits, like the fact I’m pathologically untidy and unable to keep a surface clutter-free. In the early days of social distancing measures, when WFH was very much still a novelty for many, I became aware of another annoying trait: my inability to plan meals. Now, this kind of devil-may-care attitude might be fine when it comes to thinking about lunch and dinner. But breakfast? No. Breakfast is an urgent meal, the type you need to eat as soon as you wake up, such is the level of extreme famishment.
At age 32, it’s somewhat shameful to admit to being a pathetic excuse for a grown up. It was high time, I decided, to mend my ways. Herein lay my dilemma: I hate boring breakfasts. I’m not a cereal lover. Porridge isn’t really my bag. Toast, I could take or leave. The way I see it, it’s the first meal of the day, so start as you mean to go on: eat something interesting.
By sheer happenchance, I discovered a solution: frozen, ready-to-bake croissants.
Like all good things in life, it started in M&S. For non-Brits, M&S is a posh food shop, the type of place you go to when you’ve got people coming round that you want to impress, but it’s not necessarily your everyday supermarket (unless you’re absolutely loaded). In amongst the frozen section lay the solution to all my problems.
After 20 minutes in the oven, my flat smelled like a French patisserie…
I bought a pack of 12 frozen croissants of the store’s own brand and stowed them away in the freezer. Soon after, I woke up one morning and found I’d left nothing out for breakfast for myself. After 20 minutes in the oven, my flat smelled like a French patisserie and my plate boasted one golden-brown, well-risen croissant. And in that moment, the game changed for me. How had I not been keeping a bag of these in my freezer my entire adult life?
What I later learned was that these bags of frozen pastry heaven had been right under my nose the whole time. Sainsbury’s, my local supermarket, sells bags of six of them, as do many other supermarkets.
I should note, also, that frozen croissants are more practical than keeping a tube of canned blobs Pillsbury Crescent Rolls, a more familiar option for U.S. readers, and one you have to roll out and assemble yourself — this is handy if you want to add other elements to your “crescent rolls” like chocolate before baking, but they’re not the best option for just baking one at a time. However, for the more time-conscious, the supermarket-brand frozen croissants, and others like them, come pre-folded in a bag and you can simply take one or two out as needed, and leave the rest in the freezer. You also can cook them straight from the freezer, and as mentioned, they only take around 20 minutes in the oven. They’re also a lot tastier than the multi-packs of ready-to-eat croissants you find on supermarket shelves, which don’t taste particularly fresh, aren’t very well-risen, and often look a little lacklustre.
It’s not necessarily an everyday type of breakfast, but it’s useful for the days where you wake up in a bit of a tizz with nothing in the fridge and zero will to leave your flat. I like to grate a little bit of cheddar in mine when they’re hot out of the oven, but they’re also good on their own, or with a little bit of butter.
If you’re looking to support local businesses instead of major chains, it’s worth checking with your local independent bakeries if they are able to sell you some ready-to-bake croissants. I recently discovered my local butcher sells frozen ready-to-bake sausage rolls which are just *chef’s kiss* and great for days when you can’t be bothered to make lunch. I also discovered frozen croissants at a farm shop near my parents’ home — so keep your eyes peeled, friends.
Like many people, I have spent much of this year working from home in what can best be described as an almost-horizontal position on my sofa. And during this time I have reminisced about the many aspects of my former life that I miss most. What I’ve learned is that it’s the little things in life that actually brought me the most happiness.
For me, those moments of joy came from nipping over the road from the office to grab a ‘treat breakfast’ — usually an avocado bagel, or a ham and cheese croissant. It’s the same type of glee found in spontaneous, lengthy weeknight drinks with friends, unexpectedly arranged when major gossip that needed to be spilled immediately. They’re small rituals of our former everyday lives, temporarily unavailable to us.
My bag of frozen croissants might not bring back the life I used to have, but it brings a new kind of joy to a new kind of life. Because, when you think about it, it’s not just about being organised or ‘grown up,’ it’s about the small kindnesses you give to yourself.