Doug is a breakfast person. I am not.

That doesn’t mean that I won’t eat breakfast when offered, but I’m rarely looking for it. We wake up in the morning, and breakfast is the first, maybe second, thing on Doug’s mind.

Our morning often starts, especially on the weekend, with him being woken by an urgent need for the bathroom which wakes me more gently as he hurries out of bed to alleviate himself. Nine out of ten times he comes back to bed, hoping to sleep again, only to find himself painfully awake… or maybe it’s just a way to wake me up the rest of the way. After all, once I’m up breakfast is soon to follow.

We have gotten ourselves into a routine. When he gives up on his misguided belief that he can fall back to sleep he hops up and starts about prepping a pot of coffee. On hot summer days he is only making the coffee to replace the thermos of iced coffee we keep in the fridge. I pretend that I couldn’t have gone back to sleep, then I groggily rise and use the bathroom myself before getting to work. As he settles down and the smell of coffee begins to fill the air I get to work.

Step one is always to open the fridge and browse. Usually I look at whatever leftovers we have from the previous night and begin to wonder how best to make it into breakfast. While some leftovers don’t lend themselves to being remade into breakfast, I find most of them can be turned into a delicious frittata, my most common weekend throw-together morning meal.

This weekend I was set. We had half a pork roast, a rosemary sweet potato puree and asparagus left over from the night before. I quickly set about thinly slicing the pork while I heated up my cast iron skillet and set my oven to 425 degrees. I tossed the pork and asparagus into the pan to reheat while I prepped a bowl of eggs and cream, mixing them together into what most would see as the beginning of scrambled eggs.

Seeing my pork and asparagus were just about ready, I evened out the layer of pork and asparagus, added a little salt and pepper to balance out the eggs, gave my bowl of eggs and cream one last stir and dumped it into my pan. With one final mix of the ingredients I picked up the whole pan and tossed it in the oven.

Never content with a simple put-it-on-the-plate presentation, I took my pureed sweet potato, which was soooo good the night before, and heated it in the microwave before adding a little cream cheese and putting it into a piping bag. One that turned out to be so hot I burned my hand all the way through using it. That didn’t stop me though.

With all the prep done, I set about taking my first sip of the iced coffee Doug had made for me. About ten minutes in the oven and my eggs would be risen, airy and lightly browned on top. I took a moment to check in on Doug only to find him set up in front of the TV with his computer going while he played some video games. He gave me a warm smile that made it clear how grateful he was that I was about to fill his tummy with breakfast food.

By the time I wandered back to the kitchen the frittata was done. I pulled the pan from the oven and piped my steaming hot puree over the top in a classy striped pattern before adding some finely chopped rosemary to the top of the pan. Slicing it like a pizza I carried two plates of the delicious meal to the other room and joined Doug on the couch.

Before my butt even hit the cushion the game was paused, and he was looking at the plates the way a dog does a bone in your hand. He was ready for food and within a few minutes had cleaned his plate. I’d only taken a few bites of my own, just enough to know that I had done well and it was delicious. As per our routine, I quickly handed him my plate asking him to finish it for me, which he did happily. After all, I’m not a breakfast person. I knew I’d be hungry at lunch time, but for now I was happy just to have filled his belly with something good and to stop the tide of grumpiness that would follow if he hadn’t had breakfast.

Sometimes, we do things not for ourselves but for those we love. Those things don’t always have to be hard. They don’t have to be extravagant. They don’t always have to come at a cost beyond the basic effort it takes to do the. However, when one of these little things is done out of love its value goes beyond the time, effort and money that made it. Not only did I make him breakfast, but I built another morning of simple memories that make up our life together.