Recently, I was contemplating what to make for breakfast for myself and my son with what I had in my fridge. It was one of those weeks that comes along every now and then where a trip to the grocery store just seems like a chore too trying to deal with. Of course, you never regret your shortsightedness until it's too late. So here we were, two hungry people at seven in the morning with very few choices.

So I got to thinking about what I could make and came up with a totally wonderful solution.

Coffee bread.

It's not on any menu in any restaurant in the country. It certainly wouldn't be recommended by any medical association in the world, and is probably one of the reasons that teachers end up with ulcers.

Essentially, coffee bread is a slice of bread, soaked in coffee and covered with sugar. That's it, that's all. Simple. Loaded with calories. Will probably rot your teeth without any effort at all. It was one of my mother's solutions to breakfast when I was growing up, and I turned out fine...in a manner of speaking.

Then I got to thinking about all the other things my mother subjected us to at the dinner table when I was a kid, and realized that it's a wonder I made it to adulthood.

My mother was never a great cook. I'm sure that in some circles what she cooked was considered "good". Most of us, however simply suffered through it.

My mother was a firm believer in cooking till the meat was well done. There would be no pink in the meat when she was finished with it. No nasty viruses or bacteria to hurt her family. In Mom's world, however, "well done" was another word for "charcoal briquette". The hamburgers were nearly if not completely burned. Steaks were small tasteless blobs that no amount of chewing would render swallowable. Then there was the shoe leather liver and the totally uncuttable cubed steaks. A ginsu knife wouldn't have gone through these things, and we were expected to eat them.

Meat was one thing. Then there were the vegetables that she systematically killed. Carrots that fell apart and were like lumps of orange (or almost orange) chew toys. Spinach was soaked in gallons of vinegar and simmered until it looked like dead kelp on a beach. Peas that disintigrated into green mush when touched. It was more than my brother and I could handle on most days.

The kicker, however, was the fact that neither of us were allowed from the table until this inedible mass had disappeared from our plates. Most kids would have had a dog to sneak the food to. Not us. We didn't have animals in the house, and I sincerely doubt that any self respecting dog would have choked this stuff down either.

So thinking about all this, I brewed the coffee, set out the sugar, and handed my son a plate. With all the other things that my mother had forced on us as children, I was not about to deny my own son the chance to try one of the only things that my mother had ever made with any competance.

Just like momma used to make.