A desperate battle between my affinity for carbs and my disdain for the smell of leftover milk.
When it comes to food, my father is a creature of habit. Wednesdays are for fish tacos, and Thursdays are for spaghetti. Lunch is a medley of tomatoes, cottage cheese and balsamic vinegar, topped with pepper. Breakfast is – and has been for as long as I can remember – a heaping bowl of cereal. Aside from the portion size, the concoction itself is impressive. Multiple kinds of cereal (shredded wheat and puffed wheat are the two that spring to mind, but there may be others) are topped by frozen mixed berries and milk. It’s glorious. My mom’s cereal program is a little simpler – Cheerios and milk. The point is that I was certainly raised by two cereal-and-milk eaters. And as far as I know, I always hated it.
I feel a little silly continuing to specify cerealandmilk (milked cereal? gross.), but the distinction is critical. Most of the time, growing up, I did avoid cereal completely, but not always. Sometimes I’d have a bowl (mostly puffed wheat, to my recollection) with some frozen blueberries and – no milk. My grandparents’ house in Michigan had a pantry full of a variety of cereals (from, we always suspected, a variety of decades) and cereal was definitely the primary breakfast available. Again, I’d help myself to dry cereal (Raisin Bran, if available) with blueberries – fresh, in this case. I can distinctly picture the wide, flat spoons with the plastic handles (like this, if you’re looking to score yourself a set) that were ubiquitous at that house. Probably still are, to be honest. In any case, the blueberries would give the cereal just enough moisture to get it down, but I always got funny looks.
I hate to say it, and I’m not sure if it’s really the true origin, but I trace my dislike for cereal and milk back to my mom’s morning Cheerios. She’d pour herself a bowl and get about her morning business, unloading the dishwasher or peeking at the paper. She’s not a milk slurper, though, so when all the cereal was gone, a little bit of milk would remain behind in the bowl sitting next to the sink. If you know the smell of soggy Cheerios and the left-behind milk, you know. If you don’t, well, it’s a smell. Not a great one. I think I associated that smell with all cereal and milk and just didn’t want any part of it. I also am not a big fan of milk by itself, so I think that may have played a role, though that may have been a preference adopted later in life.
My husband is a cereal-and-milk eater, too. It’s his “second dinner”* of choice. His tastes in cereal are wide-ranging, but generally center on Raisin Bran or Cheerios. Throughout our time together I can count on one hand the number of times he’s actually finished a box of cereal – typically, I think the desire is fleeting. As a result, we generally have a half-finished box of some kind of cereal on the counter somewhere. That was the case about two months ago, when I picked up the box of Apple Cinnamon Cheerios, put some in a bowl, inexplicably poured a healthy amount of oat milk over the cereal and ate the whole thing.
I didn’t really have any particularly strange cravings during pregnancy. I ate a lot of frozen blueberries and drank a lot of chocolate milk, but I thankfully never awoke in the middle of the night with a desperate need for some specific treat. I did find myself unable to eat any meat for a couple of months, which was definitely the biggest change to my diet. That passed, and things went back to normal. Then, I gave birth, and I started eating cereal with milk every day. When I say that I eat it every day, I mean I genuinely look forward to my cereal in the morning (or some other time of day). I don’t tolerate it because it’s good for me – I actually get excited to eat it. Particularly if it’s a granola day – score.
I’m not sure if my sudden shift to loving cereal with milk was purely just a hormonal taste change, or whether it has to do with the fact that oat milk doesn’t seem to react to Cheerios in the same way that cow’s milk does (no funk!), but I don’t really care. I’m on the cereal-with-milk train and you’d better watch out, because now I finally had an excuse to buy (and label!) cereal canisters. I haven’t gone so far as to branch out into different cereals or to mix my Cheerios varieties just yet, but I am my father’s daughter in many ways, so it’s probably coming. In the meantime, I’ll make sure I have some frozen berries, just in case.
* Not to be confused with dessert, it’s that thing of when you eat dinner and are still hungry but there are no leftovers (or your wife made dinner and it was OK but you really would have rather had something else) so you make yourself a giant bowl of cereal and milk. And then maybe another one, just for good measure.
Hickmans at Home 