Thursday
Jun152006
Cereal Killer
Thoughts of you pervade my brain throughout the day. Often, when darkness has cloaked the heavens in her violet mantle and stars are stitched throughout the night sky I lay in bed and think of you. Your satisfying crunch, your lovely toasted bits of goodness afloat in a sea of milk. Sometimes I can't hold back any longer and I must come to you. 3AM in the morning be damned! I MUST HAVE YOU. I love you in the morning, I love you in the afternoon and boy do I love you at night. You are the ideal entree, the perfect meal. You are everything. Cereal, will you marry me?
I just killed three bowls of cereal. In a row. One is never enough.. Two seems right.. but three? I blame it on the bowl. These fucking cereal bowls are never big enough. Portion, my ass. They're nearly as bad as the snack size cereal packages.. If I wanted a snack motherfucker, I woulda bought one. I want a bowl of CEREAL! You know the teeny, tiny packages of which I speak. Those mini-boxes Dad used to cart along on camping trips. I could kill four, maybe five of those boxes in one sitting. Cereal bowls are on par with the snack packages. Too damned small! Don't regulate my cereal consumption god dammit! I'm thinking of Ice Cubing it a la FRIDAY and just using a mixing bowl from here on out. Cereal, the other Super Bowl.
I'm told a serving of most sweetened breakfast cereals, is 30 grams. That comes out to about three-quarters of a cup, as listed on the label. So I figure I'm rocking maybe five servings per bowl. Which means, since I just housed three bowls, that I consumed 15 servings of cereal (oh snap! she can multiply!)
Obviously I've rediscovered my love for cereal. Oh, I never stopped loving my deliciously crunchy little buddies.. but we lost touch for awhile. I moved to New York, tried to branch out.. You know, attempting to be cosmopolitan and whatnot.. There was brunch.. and eatin' at exotic locales, cooking omelettes from gourmet books and such. Fuuuck that! I've recently concluded that when you're broke...it's either Ramen Noodles or cereal and I'm all about the Cheerios, baby.
When I was young I was strictly Lucky the Leprachaun's bitch... that paranoid motherfucker ("they're always after me Lucky Charms!") he must have been stoned and those marshmallows are totally the creation of someone suffering from a severe case of the munchies.
Of course, the main selling point for Lucky Charms has always been the marshmallows (or "marbits" as General Mills calls them - seriously!). I would suck those Lucky Charm marshmallows until they dissolved in a delicious puddle of sugar on my tongue. I lost my shit when purple horseshoes joined the roster of pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars and green clovers in '84. Good times.
Lucky Charms have come a long way since that fortuitous day. Since the horseshoes, the good people at General Mills have added red balloons, rainbows, pots of gold, leprechaun hats and shooting stars to the marshmallow line-up. If they're smart (or stoned) they'll slowly phase out the toasted bits and just go with marshmallows. Fucking magically delicious, they are..
Oh, Lucky and I weren't monogamous. There was a brief flirtation with the Trix rabbit and the year I turned 10 I took time off to set sail on Cap'n Crunch's milky sea. For much of '89 I was into orgies, falling victim to the siren song of those kinky bastards Snap, Crackle and Pop and their Rice Krispies. Cocoa Puffs hold a special place in my heart, of course. Whats not to love about a cereal that doubles as chocolate milk? It's bittersweet, finishing a bowl of Puffs.. On the one hand you're sad the Puffs are gone but you've got all that chocolate milk to glug.
Eventually I grew up. Since Trix are for kids and I'm nothing if not a cereal policy follower, I left the Rabbit to his pedophilia pursuits... There were the "healthy" years just after college before Dr. Atkins ruined my granola loving, bread snarfing existence. The food season in which granola, saltine crackers and bagels were considered healthy.
I'd eat the shit out of all the granola cereals with fat/carb/ content that would explode your fat cells (Clusters and 'Healthy' Choice Almond Crunch I'm looking at you..) But it's healthy, right? It's granola...RIGHT?
Now I'm wise to those granola pushers and their diabolical schemes ... Instead I just mainline Cheerios and Kix like they've been (God forbid) discontinued. These cereals are low in fat AND relatively low in carbs while maintaining their deliciousness.. Walking the fine line between Atkins and normalcy is fucking exhausting, isn't it? But if one is in love with cereal, one has to thumb one's nose at Atkins and his no carb obsession. And as MeatLoaf (ironically, an Atkins approved food) opines; I'd do anything for love... Er.. and food.
Food
Reader Comments (19)
In defense of Lucky, he really did have a pack of crazed kids up his ass constantly trying to steal his personal belongings. I think that's pretty fucked up. It was actually down right scary. Do I really need to say "Princess Di?"
And the Trix Bunny. Although he was probably trying to feel up all the tiny cartoon children with his inappropirately long "ears," isn't that what sharing is all about?
No body fucked with Tony the Tiger. Probably because he'd eat you. He was a really good skier too.
And now, my real question...was the honey bee from honey nut cheerios a homosexual or am I just WAY off base?
And when rice krispies started making Rice Krispies treats cereal, I about died.
My roommate brought Fruit Loops home the other day and I ate them out of the box, while drunk in the middle of the night.
My latest thing is eating it dry--- just out of the box. A Cereal Feeding Frenzy with Sugar Corn Pops stuck in the crack of my sofa!
I don't think cereal is an unsophisticated foodstuff at all, but I have to admit that I'm a bit unsophisticated myself when I've filled up my feeding bag *whinny* with Cocoa Crispies.
French Toast Crunch - I'm not sure if they still make this one, but when I first tried it, it made me drool. It was like eating warm butter and maple syrup on gushy sugar cereal puffs. So dirty and wrong, but sooo good. Then somebody must've looked at the bigger-than-the-deficit calorie and trans-fat count and jerksticked the recipe, because it started sucking a few months later.
Waffle-Os - A late 70's early 80's cereal with a freaky prosepector/cowboy/rodeo rider logo and a very *processed* taste that I couldn't get enough of as a five year old. Once again I have a feeling the FDA found something less than savory in the "artificial flavors" on this bad-boy. I still have the shirt you could mail in box-tops and get up in the attic.
Super Colon Blow - Why Saturday Night Live didn't acutally make a cereal called "Super Colon Blow" after this sketch was so well received, I'll never know. But anybody who truly relishes the post cereal morning dump would've surreptitiously slipped this bad boy into their shopping cart at the A&P and gone to town when they got it home.
Right now I have three unopened boxes of Soy Protein Smart Start in the cupboard, I just can't eat that shit.
My parents don't believe in sugar.
I used to steal money from my mother to buy candy.
(I don't know why I had to add that. Honesty is liberating or something.)
So I missed out on cereal. I look forward to discovering it. But right now it seems too sweet and unhealthy.