Why I (generally) avoid eating cold cereal..............

As part of our holiday "baking" we made Chex mix. You know, the stuff that you have to buy three different kinds of Chex cereal for, and then use only a couple of cups of each? Talk about clever marketing! Anyway, having all those open boxes of cereal drives me nuts so I have been eating some of it as a quick and convenient breakfast, as I am still on a preventative antibiotic (that I have to take four (4!) times a day with food which totally sucks).

In my opinion, there is not much that taste worse than soggy cereal. I have attempted to eat cold cereal without any milk on it to avoid the soggyness, but something happens to my saliva glands after the first couple of bits and the rest of the bowl tastes like a relative of sawdust. Yuck!

My technique instead has been to put the cereal in a bowl, hold the bowl on an angle, and put a small amount of milk in the bottom of the bowl. Then, depending on how fast I can scoop, chew, and swallow, I actually enjoy the first two or three bites. I try and work a few pieces into the milk and then immediately scoop them out to eat them. One second two long swimming in the milk and the cereal becomes a lost cause. I could devote more time to this endevor and do like I do when I eat crackers in soup. I simply drop in a piece of cracker one at a time to prevent them from getting over soggy. The problem with doing this with cold cereal, is that if I am going to invest this much time into eating it, I might as well take the time up front to make oatmeal with I really enjoy rather than try so hard to make the cold cereal tolorable.

And of course, eating as fast as humanly possible (has anyone heard of cold cereal eating contests? I might be able to give someone a run for their money if I entered one)means that when I finish my stomach always feels as if I have a lead balloon sitting inside of it. Now there is something to look forward to...NOT!

And I MUST toss out what little milk is left in the bowl when the cereal is gone. I am not a fan of milk in the first place, but knowing this particular milk harbored soggy cereal so short of a time ago, I cannot face the notion of tilting up the bowl and drinking the milk from the side as so many people seem to relish doing. Note: One might want to file this tidbit of information and then if ever in a situation of torturing me would have the perfect method of making me talk. ("Either tell me now or I am going to make you drink left-over cereal milk!")

Of course I blame this completely on the cereal makers. If a box of cereal didn't cost so darn much I would simply throw away the leftover instead of forcing myself to eat it. Maybe I should figure out a way to send it to those starving children in other countries tha I used to hear about when I was a child and didn't want to finish my dinner. Nope! I wouldn't do that to those poor kids, so I guess I am stuck eating it. Woe is me...