Well, as an Autumnal au Revoir, we’ve just had a beauty. It’s nearly all downhill from here on out, I fear. There seem to be numerous warnings about an “el Nino winter” and how we could be in for a freezer bowl this time around after having been just barely noticing snowflakes last winter (Was there more than one episode of sledding down in back of the Y ? If so, I must have missed them.). My Farmers’ Almanac–not the Old Farmer’s Almanac, some newer, fly-by-night version dating from only 1818, shows Cold, Stormy, fading into Frosty, Flakey, Slushy to the east of us and just plain cold, with average snowfall to our West. This particular publication–under the rubric “BRRR is Back”– predicts a return to traditional winter conditions, with some “excessive precipitation” over the Great Lakes and Midwest. The really OLD Farmer’s Almanac (1792) shows Cold, Snowy for virtually the entire midsection of the country, slightly milder in New England, but still snowy. So… take your pick…and wax your skis and sled runners, get out the woolies and mukluks; could get a tad nippy. Be ready.
It is coming up on my annual switch from cold to hot cereal to mark the change of seasons. I used to announce it at the lunch table at school. I’m sure that my fellow lunchers were waiting with bated breath for the news flash. At least nobody threw bags of Doritos at me on the occasion of this significant information (Lunches were pretty boring, for the most part but in the really OLD days, in the OLD building–now the Y–everybody, the kids that is, ate their brown-bag lunches on the bleachers in the gym, no tables, no hot food, and the faculty ate in the boiler room…heckuv an ambience that was.).
Anyway, Both my hot and my cold cereals are a custom blend that I sorta whip up out of any number of boxed roughages found in the cereal aisles. I’m always on the lookout for new brands and sales (anything that is even marginally good-for-you is never on sale, didja ever notice?). With an eye to fiber content (Let’s hear it for roughage!), low sugar, nuts & berries (Kellog got in trouble once about their one variety sold as flakes with “red berries”, when it turned out that the “red berries” were simply dyed flakes. Somebody called them on it and they now have actual fruit…so they say.). Hot cereal is bumped up with whatever kind of dried fruit I can lay my hands on. Running across pineapple bits amidst the steel-cut oats & granola is entertaining; makes it a little less like gruel (Always makes me think of “Oliver”, when he says, “”Please, sir, may I have some more?”). Summer cereal blends are much more expansive and start off with bananas and a three-fruit blend–blackberries, blueberries and red raspberries. And, of course, winter gourmet blends can be cooked ahead of time and kept in the fridge to be reheated in the morning. Doing cold cereals before the very last minute results in actual cold gruel that even looks worse than it tastes.
I do eat some pretty gnarly combos sometimes, winter or summer; some are crunchier than others and occasionally the bananas reach retirement age before we get to the end of the week, so I have to go shopping for some that are not totally brown–totally brown means they head for the freezer to await their chance to become banana bread (My banana bread tends to have all sorts of fruit in it, not just bananas. What ever jam needs finishing off, anything that did not make it into the hot cereal, apples reaching retirement age as well, I’m not picky but I am desperate to get some stuff out of the freezer/refrigerator and the pantry…and I’m kinda cheap.).
I love breakfast out. I love all of the “breakfast food” but I don’t fix it for myself very often. When somebody else fixes it…that’s another story. Bring on the Eggs Benedict!
