Welcome to the opening of our foray into the world of breakfasts. Like any blogging series, this one needs arbitrary rules subject to modification on a whim. The rules are:

1. Countries are pretty much the ones that pop up on Wikipedia plus nations that are recognized by a significant number of other countries. This means that Taiwan and Palestine make the list, but South Ossetia doesn’t. Sorry, South Ossetians. Also, we won’t be including autonomous or native/aboriginal reservations. Please don’t hate us, everyone.
2. All the meals we will be making are vegetarian. Deal with it.
3. We’ll move through the list in alphabetical order as best as we can.
4. We rely on the wisdom of the internet to tell us what people eat for breakfast in each country. We are well aware that there is more than one thing that people eat for breakfast, so we will use the following criteria: It should be as unique to the country as possible. It should be vegetarian if possible (otherwise we’ll modify it). When in doubt, we’ll go for the thing that sounds like it will taste good.

If this sounds like a bad set of rules, feel free to do this better than us.

We’ll be starting off avoiding controversy by making a breakfast from sleepy Afghanistan. This turns out to be a great place to begin because as far as we can tell Afghan breakfasts are pretty much eggs and bread with veggies. Yum. Here’s the first version that came up on Google and it’s essentially what we made.

The dish right after the eggs were added.

We added a central Asian non from the excellent book HomeBaking. I think this really made the whole thing come together, although that might just be my own bias since it was the whole of my contribution to the dish.

Eggs + Bread = Breakfast.

Now here’s the part of the blog post where I render judgment on a nation based on the breakfast recipe I found on the internet. This was really good! Yay, Afghanistan. The eggs cooked over the vegetables and got a really velvety texture along with a nice bright flavor. The bread helped sop up the liquids and balance the tomatoes. I was taken back to my time in Kabul (the Afghan restaurant on State St. in Madison, Wisconsin).

Stay tuned to be whisked away via breakfast to Albania.