Fraters Libertas

Cereal Philandering

I have a bad habit of not quite finishing the last of the cereal in the box. When it feels like there is less than a full bowl in there I dispatch it to the bottom of the pantry, where it can sit for a long time.

This morning I woke up and realized that I had no fresh cereal. I usually like to keep at least 2 boxes at the ready to avoid this type of calamity, but I must have screwed up.

Looking down at the bottom of the pantry I found partial boxes of Raisin Bran, Great Grains, Cub-brand Honey Nut and Corn Chex. Now there is nothing worse than pouring an ounce of leftover cereal in your bowl and then getting 4 ounces of cereal dust that tastes like old chalk along with it. So, I decided to try to combine the cereals to make what I hoped would be two full bowls.

The obvious way to do this was to group like-cereals together. For example, the Corn Chex and the Cub Honey Nut were basically birds of the same feather--oven toasted corn cereal and oven toasted rice and corn cereal respectively.

That would make one bowl, but the next one was a bit more of a dilemma. The Great Grains describes itself as “The goodness of whole grains...and crunchy pecans”. By itself a morning delight, but with Raisin Bran?

Being a natural risk-taker, I decided to combine the Raisin Bran with the Honey Nut, reasoning that since Honey Nut was sweeter, it would overcome the inherent conflict of a bran with a non-bran cereal. Turned out okay, only there was too much Raisin Bran for the Honey Nut to overcome.

That left the Great Grains and the Corn Chex combo, which I consumed with mixed results. The Corn Chex immediately floated to the top of the bowl and the Great Grains, bloated by the weight of the pecans, went straight to the bottom. They were basically a soggy mess by the time I got through the first layer of Chex and the pecans had not aged so well.

So I’m off to the grocery store to score some more boxes. I think I’ll need to get at least four, meaning I'll probably repeat this entire rediculous episode in about a month.