Is it breakfast time yet?

Sometimes I feel like a walking contradiction.

For instance, I love breakfast food, but I hate getting up early.

Let me be clear — when I say hate, I don’t mean I find it mildly disagreeable. I mean hate with the fiery hot passion of the July sun.

That said, nothing will get me out of bed and moving faster than the smell of bacon cooking.

Some of my favorite meals growing up were the nights my grandmother decided she just didn’t feel like making anything complicated and just pulled out the electric skillet and proceeded to launch an epic breakfast throwdown — for dinner.

There might be pancakes and sausage; or scrambled eggs, fried potatoes and bacon. Sometimes, there’d be fried apples or even sausage gravy, but there were always biscuits.

Most of the time, they were the premade kind you bang on the counter to get out of the can — her homemade biscuits were amazing, but we’re talking about convenience here.

I was always excited when I saw the frying pans and the electric skillet come out. The house would fill with wonderful smells and exciting sounds as the bacon sizzled and popped and the biscuits baked in the oven.

Of course, all that activity, coupled with those enticing smells, drew me into the kitchen where I was underfoot so much that I was often quickly put to work, peeling potatoes, mixing pancake batter, whipping up eggs, making toast for fried egg sandwiches or even just making a fresh batch of iced tea.

As a result, breakfast food officially became the first meals I learned to cook, and thanks to my grandmother, I learned to crank out a pretty good breakfast spread.

Before long, the spatula was passed to me and those nights when we had breakfast for supper saw me running the show — under my grandmother’s supervision of course.

After all the cooking was done came my favorite part of the night — sitting down to a stack of steaming pancakes or eggs or biscuits and gravy at dinnertime.

While the food was always good, I also got a little thrill out of it, because this seemed like breaking the rules.

“Breakfast for dinner?! How absurd!”

How awesome, you mean.

Looking back, I’m not sure that my grandmother wasn’t being sneaky about teaching me to cook. Breakfast is fairly uncomplicated and a good place to start familiarizing someone with the kitchen.

Add in the fact that she knew me well enough to know that I’d never be eager to roll out of bed and 6 a.m. ready to cook, and maybe having breakfast for dinner was an incredibly smart move.

Not only did it give her a chance to pass on useful skills, but it gave her a chance to spend time with me doing something she loved and show me how making a meal to share with others can be more than a chore.

Cleanup, on the other hand ... well, that’s another story.

In the grand scheme of things, having breakfast for dinner probably isn’t an earth-shaking change, but it meant a lot to me on a number of levels.

Pass the biscuits, please.

Robert Cox is associate editor for Carroll County Newspapers. His email address is RCox@cherryroad.com.