make mine cereal

The wisdom of my Grade 8 Foods & Nutrition teacher

bowl of cereal with marshmallows
Photo by Carlie Wright on Pexels.com

Her name was Ms Anderson, and she was the first teacher I had who went by Ms. She was very modern. I took Foods and Nutrition (a fancy name for Cooking) with her for Grade 8. Back then–the late 1970s–cooking was still widely perceived as a “girl/woman” thing1I made history at my junior high by being the first male recipient of the year-end cooking award in the groovy year of 1978. This was reflected by my class only having four guys in it (I was one of the four).

Looking back, the three things I remember most were:

  • A mystery recipe she put on the board, tasking each unit (four people) to figure out the recipe and then make it. There was no internet to cheat with back then. Our group correctly guessed baking powder biscuits. Another unit incorrectly guessed cookies and the results were more akin to lethal projectiles than anything edible. And were treated as such.

The other two were things Ms Anderson said:

  • Most breakfast cereals are basically candy. It was true then, and I think, is even more accurate now, as a lot of “adult” cereals are very high in sugar content, even though they present themselves as “nutritious.” I still feel a bit guilty when I have a bowl of Reese’s Puffs because of what she said (I only buy them on sale, I swear).
  • Clean as you go. This is one of those little nuggets of kitchen wisdom that is transformative when you first hear it. I still clean as I go over 40 years after taking her class, and nothing beats finishing a meal with minimal dishes to clean up afterwards.

So a thanks to Ms Anderson. She was young, so might only be in her 70s now, probably retired. I’d love to hear the kinds of stories she’d tell.

A very serious ranking of Cheerios

Photo by author. I wonder if the next edition will be SAD HEART SHAPES.

When I was a kid, I ate candy for breakfast. By which I mean cereal where sugar was the first five ingredients. Some of them even had sugar right in the name, like Sugar Smacks. Mmm, Sugar smacks…

As an adult, I try to be a little more sensible with cereals, so I bade farewell to my buddies Cap’n Crunch and Count Chocula. To be fair, skipping Cap’n Crunch has saved me from countless mouth lacerations.

One of my go-to healthier picks now is Cheerios, which is recent years has expanded into a Cheerios Empire, with more flavours than you can shake a stick made out of whatever passed for those weird crunchy “marshmallows” in Count Chocula. I have not tried every flavour, and the sugar content ranges from almost none to first five ingredients.

Here is how I rank Cheerios, of the ones I’ve tried:

  1. Multigrain Cheerios. This is probably the closest to pure Cheerios while adding a bit more variety. It’s also the lowest in sugar to the original. It tastes good, but not so good that I will eat half a box at one sitting.
  2. Original Cheerios. Something about the blandness of having nothing added accentuates the simple oat flavour. As a bonus, it has almost no sugar and because its flavour is merely pleasant, I don’t gorge on it.
  3. Chocolate Cheerios. Not as high in sugar as you’d think. It is sweet, but not overly so and, of course, you end up with chocolate milk in the bowl. Yum! An occasional treat.
  4. Honey Nut Cheerios. I actually haven’t tried this in years, but I remember it being sweet, but not too sweet. I may have had a less discerning palate back in the olden days, though. It ranks lower because of the sugar/honey content, and I haven’t felt compelled to try it again due to that.
  5. Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. I finally tried these recently. The sugar content is on the higher side. It tastes heavy, somehow. I would not gorge on this, nor do I think I would try it again. If it was Cheerios with a hint of apple and cinnamon flavouring (like, aimed at adults), I’d probably like it a lot more.

There are a billion other flavours out there, because it seems like they’re throwing a lot out there to see what sticks, but these are the ones I’ve tried.

For the cereal curious, the other cereals I eat semi-regularly are:

  • Crispix (low sugar, light and crunchy)
  • Reese Peanut Butter Puffs (guilty pleasure, but lower in sugar than you might think)
  • Rice Chex (like Crispix, but Crispix is better)

What the heck happened to Lucky Charms?

Oh, they may still be “magically delicious” but what happened to the traditional weird little marshmallow things they used to have in Lucky Charms? You know:

  • pink hearts
  • orange stars
  • green clovers
  • yellow moons
  • blue diamonds

Now there are rainbows (which make sense), shooting stars (which make sense if you believe leprechauns are from outer space, I guess), something that looks like a rotten tooth (I think it’s a hat?) and an hourglass so you are reminded that soon it will be time to visit the dentist if you don’t remember to brush after eating this stuff.

The simplicity, the magic, if you will, has diminished in the quest to put in more stuff. Also, the cereal is now being pitched at adults because if kids and adults eat your cereal, your profits will be magically delicious.

While I can’t say I yearn for Lucky Charms nowadays it was probably my favorite cereal as a kid, saving the marshmallows for last, of course. And even with today’s weird collection of marshmallows, Lucky Charms still has the benefit over Cap’n Crunch of not lacerating the roof of your mouth when you eat them.

My taste buds are all grown-up

I really like non-sweetened cereals now. To keep my sugar intake low I look for cereal with no sugar. This eliminates nearly everything you’ll find on the shelves of most grocery stores, but there are a few brands out there, most of them of the puffed wheat variety (you know, the cereal that came in those gigantic plastic bags you could stuff the pet dog into). The one I prefer most is Grape-Nuts. I quite like its crunchy texture and nutty flavor — and I mean nutty in the sense of “it tastes like nuts” rather than “the flavor is clinically insane”. I have an occasional bowl with unsweetened soy milk when I get that breakfast cereal craving. The fact that it satisfies me, that I actually look forward to the bowl is somewhat remarkable considering I grew up on Cap’n Crunch (the shredder of mouths), Count Chocula and Lucky Charms (I always saved the marshmallows for last, so I’d have  a bowl half-filled with pastel-colored milk and spongy yet still strangely kind of crunchy marshmallow bits at the end).

Kids really are amazing. How did I eat all that crap and not balloon up to 300 pounds? Oh yeah, metabolism, that thing that left me in a huff around the time I turned 20.