Easy Breakfast Parfait

First week of December. Houston's version of winter: sixties during the day, forties at night, the occasional frost that sends the local news into a frenzy of reporting. I put a blanket on the smoker's firebox to keep it insulated during overnight cooks, which is a technique Mr. Clarence taught me thirty years ago and which makes me look like a man tucking his smoker into bed. I am that man. I am not ashamed.

The Vietnam trip is three months away. I've been slowly accumulating things: a passport holder (Mai's passport was renewed last year, which Linh handled because Mai would not have done it herself), a list of phrases in Vietnamese that I've forgotten or never learned properly, a small photo album of family pictures to bring with us. The photo album is the thing that undid me this week. I sat on the couch Tuesday night and went through old photos — Huy and Mai young in Houston, Linh and me as kids, Tyler and Emma and Lily as babies — and I put together a book of maybe thirty photos that tells the story of our family from 1975 to now. The idea is to give it to Mai on the plane. Or in Vietnam. Or at Mrs. Thi's house. I don't know when. I'll know.

Kevin is thriving at the bakery. He came to Tuesday's meeting and talked about making sourdough — how the starter is a living thing you have to feed and tend, how the bread takes two days from start to finish, how the patience required is the opposite of everything a kitchen line taught him. "I used to cook in five-minute tickets," he said. "Now I measure in days." I thought about the smoker. I thought about the fourteen-hour brisket. I thought about how recovery is the same: measured in days, tended patiently, alive because you feed it.

Made chè — Vietnamese dessert soup — for the first time in years. Specifically, chè ba màu: three-color dessert. Layers of sweetened red beans, yellow mung beans, and green pandan jelly, topped with coconut milk and crushed ice. It's a dessert that looks like a traffic light and tastes like a cold, sweet, textural paradise. Mai taught me to make it when I was fourteen and I remember thinking it was the strangest thing I'd ever eaten — beans for dessert? But the sweetened beans in coconut milk make a kind of sense that you don't understand until you taste it, and then you understand completely. I brought a container to Mai Saturday. She said, "Not sweet enough." I added more sugar. She tasted again. "Better." My desserts, like my soups, are always co-authored.

The real chè ba màu — Mai’s version, co-authored as always — is its own project, one I’ll share another time. But after that week of layering old photos into an album, of watching Kevin layer days of patience into bread, I kept coming back to the idea of building something beautiful one layer at a time. This parfait is the weekday version of that impulse: yogurt, fruit, granola, stacked in a glass the way sweetened beans and pandan jelly stack in a bowl. It’s simpler than chè ba màu, but the principle is the same — each layer matters, and you eat it knowing someone put them there on purpose.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 0 minutes | Total Time: 10 minutes | Servings: 2

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups vanilla Greek yogurt
1 cup granola
1/2 cup fresh strawberries, sliced
1/2 cup fresh blueberries
1 medium banana, sliced
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons sliced almonds

Instructions

Prepare the fruit. Wash and slice the strawberries and banana. Set the blueberries aside.
Build the first layer. Spoon about 1/4 cup of yogurt into the bottom of each glass or jar. Add a layer of granola, then a layer of sliced strawberries.
Add the second layer. Spoon another 1/4 cup of yogurt over the strawberries. Add banana slices and a drizzle of honey.
Finish the parfait. Add the remaining yogurt on top. Scatter blueberries and the rest of the granola over the surface. Top with sliced almonds and a final drizzle of honey.
Serve immediately. Eat right away for the best texture contrast between creamy yogurt and crunchy granola, or refrigerate up to 4 hours (the granola will soften).

Nutrition (per serving)

Easy Breakfast Parfait — Three Layers, One Memory