A Swiss winter breakfast

Most of the time we have a very sensible Swiss breakfast of orange juice, strong tea and muesli. On weekends we tend to replace the muesli with toast and jam, since the cellar holds so many jars of jam from our garden fruit.

But we are now in panatone season, and for 3-4 weeks we gorge ourselves with the treat from over the Alps in Italy. A friend who is married to an Italian shakes her head at our happiness with the supermarket variety, inexpensive and a household favorite. True, just once we ate some of the upper class panatone at her house and agreed that it was 1,000 times better. But the price was triple our supermarket staple one, and in this quality versus quantity debate, quantity has won out, in my home.

We are not alone: the supermarkets in Vaud and Valais have to move several shelves to make room for their popular panatone mountains.