Earlier this week one of our local morning radio hosts – Garner Andrews – ended up talking about cereal for awhile. My five minutes of writing today follows that same theme.
I’ve eaten cereal as a regular part of my morning routine since I was probably five or six years old. That’s a lot of cereal.
Growing up my mom wasn’t so concerned about health cereals, so indeed we regularly had many of the ‘big three’ Garner Andrews talked about earlier this week – Honeycomb, Froot Loops, and Frosted Flakes.
But we had many others that we loved too – Frankenberries (which sadly can’t be found anymore), Corn Pops (another popular one), and the veritable Cap’n Crunch. We played around with some others as well – Count Chocula for example – but always came back to those first six. We would rarely go shopping with my mom, so she’d just pick one from our favorites list, or else maybe she just bought whatever was on sale.
My habit continued after I left home, starting off my morning with one of those; and continued on through marriage with my beautiful wife Heather. Of course, at some point my wife started shaking her head and tried to move me towards healthier cereals. I’ve tried some, many of which I think taste like cardboard, or “a sod hut” like Garner. However, she’s now convinced me of mixing cereals, as Garner also suggested. So she gets me this one pretty healthy cereal all the time – I think it’s some type of corn puffs (since my wife is also trying to get us to refrain from so much gluten) – and then I add organic peanut butter gorilla munch (or something like that). They mix well, and it makes Heather happy, and it makes me happy. A beautiful compromise.
Of course, I’m not ashamed to admit I still grab a box of the Cap’n or other cereal to have on a weekend morning. Or, like this morning, when I mixed the gorilla munch and corn puffs, and then add on top some crumbled chocolate chip cookie. If you’ve never tried this, you simply must, it’s a perfect capper to the top. And you get some of the chocolate chip cookies to start with; and then some inevitably sink to the bottom, but are still just as crunchy when you find them hiding under the milk (which, by the way, is now rice milk, as opposed to 2% back when I lived at home).
For those joining in from the SOC link, this is my ‘whatever strikes me’ blog; I also post daily on new music over at www.newmusicmichael.com blog.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Sounds like we grew up in the same household. We had so much sugar it was ridiculous. Even when we were eating a “healthy” cereal like Cheerios, my mom would give us the sugar bowl to pile on top.
In fact, I just bought Frankenberries at Halloween (they were out for a limited time) and Boo Berry just for nostalgia’s sake. I still love Corn Pops and Golden Grahams but I limit myself to healthy cereals.
As a former sugar cereal junkie, these are my favorite cereals that you might like to try: Barbara’s Peanut Butter Puffins, Kashi Cinnamon Harvest, and I even like Kashi Go Lean Crunch. They really have gotten much better!
Ohhhhh I forgot about Booberry !!!!