Today on Food on a Fridays we have flashbacks and updates on food topics covered previously on the blog.

First up: breakfast. A few months ago I posted about how most people’s breakfast choices are non-negotiable, even if they are not otherwise set in the their ways when it comes to food. An article this week in the New York Times posits that indeed our preferences for breakfast selections are instilled in us as kids. I highly recommend checking it out; it talks about kids in different countries and what they learn to eat as part of their “normal” breakfast foods. There are lots of good photos of the foods and cute kids, too. The fact that kids can willingly eat things like natto (Japanese fermented soy beans) and cod liver oil (Iceland) must prove that if you start eating something at a very young age, and everyone around you considers it normal, you can eat anything at all for breakfast.

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Switching from breakfast to dinner, I want to take the opportunity to point you over to a travel website done by a woman named Heather Cowper. Heather kindly invited me to write a guest post on her website, and she published my post there today.  My topic is a description — complete with photos! — of the autumn Tyrolean Törgellen feast. It’s a meal that centers around pork, with a few other things included as well.

BTW, I also talk a bit more about the Törgellen celebration in my book, Life on a Gelato Diet; sorry, can’t resist a quick plug for the book when the opportunity presents itself. 😉

Anyway, Chris and I haven’t been to a Törgellen in years, since that was something we did in Bolzano. We have yet to run across a similarly specific autumn foods feast here in Tübingen. Tomorrow is the annual regional foods festival in Tübingen, but our experience these past 3 years is that the festival foods here tend to be the same at festivals all year round: there’s bratwurst, pan-fried potato-based noodles with bits of bacon and onions, and pretzels. Lots of pretzels.  While all of that is tasty, it’s not the same level of celebration as a Törgellen, as you’ll see when you’ve read my post on Heather’s website. 🙂

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Of course, a food that does make a reappearance around this time of year in Tübingen is the Berliner, the German jelly doughnut by any other name.  Now, you might think by mentioning the Berliner I have managed to come full-circle in this post back to breakfast foods.  But then, you may recall from my frequent posts about doughnuts over the past few years that Berliners can be eaten in Germany and Italy at anytime of the day or night — but never at breakfast.  😉

BTW, I’ve now categorized all my doughnut posts on this blog as the “Doughnut Diaries” (thanks to Chris for suggesting the name).  Look for more “diary” entries based on some research we did on our recent trip … coming soon…