Profgrrrrl's Cereal Meme

When do you eat it? And how often?
I'll eat it any time of day, whenever I am a hungry. I do not live in a household that has the three-meals-each-day ritual. Most of us just eat when we are hungry.

How many boxes do you buy each week?
Six

What are your favorite cereals?
Restaurant oatmeal is my favorite: I love the texture of it. When I meet my friends for breakfast, to eat and chat and share poetry, I always get oatmeal and orange juice. When I take an annual drive to the mountains every fall with my parents, we stop at a diner and I get oatmeal.

My cold cereals are just any of those natural grain types that all taste the same. With-a-Why is going through a Cinnamon Life stage.

What kind will you not eat?
I don't like the mostly sugar ones.

What is the secret about cereal that you don't always admit?
Sometimes if I am at a conference, I will order room service oatmeal because it tastes so good and because I absolutely cannot function without food first thing in the morning. But I do feel guilty spending about ten dollars on a bowl of oatmeal and a glass of juice.

What liquid do you pour on your cereal?
Vanilla soy milk on cold cereal.

What do you put on top of your cereal?
I love fresh blueberries on cold cereal.
On oatmeal, it's brown sugar and raisins.

Do you prefer cereal or other foods for breakfast?
My preference would be a croissant drizzled with melted dark chocolate on a spring day in Paris.

Do you have any cereal-related rituals or other oddities?
When I was a kid, my mother would never buy the sugar cereals, so I used to always take a spoonful of sugar and sprinkle it on. I saw Davy Jones do this once on the Monkees. And he was a grown-up! But I don't do that any more.

Favorite cereal memories?
When I was a little kid, we would get cool prizes in the cereal boxes. My favourite was a set of tiddly winks.

On camping trips, my mother used to sometimes buy those little boxes of cereal. You would break open the box on the perforated lines, pour milk right into the box, and eat it in the box. Then you could just toss the box in the fire.

On dark winter mornings when I was a kid, my mother would make a big pot of oatmeal with peaches in it. We all sit around the kitchen table, eating oatmeal and listening to the list of school closings on the radio. Always there was the hope that we would get a snow day. And snow days are so exciting!

When I lived in London for a semester as a college student, one of my roommates used to make oatmeal every morning, and I would eat a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of hot tea as I planned my day: which cathedral or garden or museum to see, which play to go to that evening, which pub to drink at with my friends.

Your favorite thing about cereal?
Reading the back of the box! But cereal boxes have gotten less fun over the decades. Or maybe it's because I buy the boring healthy cereal instead of the fun kid cereal now.