Tag Archives: cereal

Curdled

Curdled: (adj) spoiled, soured

They put us up in a barn.

That night, I became convinced that everyone in the world would have hay fever if they found themselves lying on hay. I do believe it’s a proximity issue.

It was chilly. We had just performed at a coffee house. We were hungry.

Our host, feeling magnanimous, had offered his barn for lodging and even allowed us to pull our old van inside, just in case we needed to access our “stuff.”

We finally were able to communicate that we had not eaten.

He and his wife appeared about five minutes later, to our barn layout, holding a carton of milk and a box of cereal.

I mustered the courage to ask for bowls and spoons so we could partake of the cereal. They agreed, even though they were a bit disappointed that they had left something out and we exposed them.

They both ran back to the house and only she returned five minutes later with some old bowls and some spoons. We expressed our appreciation.

We were so thankful for the cereal and milk.

We poured out huge bowls—all the way to the top—and figured out how much milk was in the carton, dividing it evenly among the three bowls waiting to be baptized. We also ended up using exactly the amount of cereal left in the box.

It didn’t matter. We were gonna eat.

That is…

Until one of my friends put her spoon in and…spit out the first bite.

Because, she said, the milk was curdled.

(Actually, she used the word “sour.” But since my word today is “curdled,” I’ll go for the original.)

My other friend and I took bites—and she was absolutely right. The milk had long ago lost its vintage.

Sitting in the mostly dark barn with the smell of hay everywhere, with grumbling tummies, we were presented with an interesting dilemma.

Since we had already doused the cereal, there was no way to eat it without the milk. And since the milk was already in the bowls, there was no way to remove it without having tainted flavor on the cereal.

We sat for at least five minutes, just staring at each other, hoping to draw wisdom from our neighbor.

Finally, one of my friends piped up. “I hear that in Denmark they eat their cold cereal with buttermilk.”

We frowned at her. She continued.

“Well, if you think about it, buttermilk is really just spoiled milk that’s been promoted.”

Finishing, she took a big bite of cereal, stating, “Really. The Lucky Charms are so sweet that you can barely taste the curdled milk.”

There were so many things wrong with that statement. But we weren’t going to throw it away, which meant we were certainly going to eat our cereal that night with a Danish flair.

 

funny wisdom on words that begin with a C

Crunchy

Crunchy: (adj) crisp or brittle.

Here I go again, bathing in the acid of honesty.

I don’t know why I do this. I could lie to you. You’d never know. It isn’t like you’re trying to vet me for government service.

I could deceive you like crazy.

But for some reason, I’ve settled in on this “schtick” of candor.

Truthfulness.

Honest, even if it makes me look a little dumb. Because I will tell you right now, looking a little dumb is better than lying and looking a lot dumb.

I don’t like crunchy things.

I just don’t.

People like their cereal crunchy.

Not me. I let mine sit around until it drowns, and the coroner arrives to confirm that it’s fully floppy and dead. As a kid, I often ate other children’s cereal they had rejected—“because it wasn’t crunchy anymore.”

Maybe that’s the root cause of my obesity. At least it would be fun to blame it on that.

I don’t like crunchy chicken.

You know—what they call “extra crispy?”

My French fries can be a little crispy—but if they’re a lot crispy, doesn’t that just mean they’re burned?

And I never got the idea of a crunchy candy bar. Has anyone ever tasted a Milky Way? No crunch anywhere. Just ecstasy.

I don’t like crunchy.

I will eat peanut brittle—only because I know that on the thirteenth chewing in my mouth, it turns into that delicious peanut butter paste I love so much.

Crunchy crunches.

And crunching is not a positive word. (Just consider your car.)

I don’t like to put my teeth into a reluctant apple. I know it sounds silly, but when an apple insists on being crisp and crunchy, I feel it’s just resistant to being eaten. Sometimes it even adds a sour disposition to match the crunch.

I have no criticism for people who like crunchy things, but my philosophy is, if you find yourself in the middle of the crunch…

Just pour on more milk and wait awhile.

 

funny wisdom on words that begin with a C

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Cereal

Cereal: (n) a breakfast food made from roasted grain

When I was a child, I ate as a child. Now that I’ve become a man, I’ve put away good taste.

As a boy, breakfast was sweet cereal. I had many favorites. My choices were layered–there were those cereals I begged for at the grocery
 store, but my mom refused to buy because they were too expensive (though she insisted it was because of the sugar content).

I ate those varieties when I stayed overnight at my friends’ house. For the record, Lucky Charms were magically delicious. And if you’re going to spend some time with Captain Crunch, make sure he’s peanut butter flavored.

Then there were the cereals my mother would buy, which were sweet enough for me to be tantalized. Sugar Smacks. And one of my personal favorites–Honeycomb, which I would describe as very sweet air.

But my mother preferred Raisin Bran, Puffed Wheat (because it was cheap) and Life cereal.

I remember throwing a tantrum for nearly fifteen minutes because I was required to consume a bowl of Life cereal. I explained to my mother that there was something wrong with the concoction–that it tasted rotten, fermented, or maybe even poisoned. She disagreed, citing Good Housekeeping’s approval.

Then one day–oh, and it was sudden–I woke up and became an adult, and started considering the nastiness of nutrition.

No one has actually proven that fiber, vitamins, minerals or oat bran actually lengthen your life. Perhaps it just makes you feel like you live longer. But now I check the fiber on the side of the cereal box instead of whether there’s a prize inside.

Something is missing.

Something is amiss.

I miss something.

 

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Breakfast

j-r-practix-with-border-2

Breakfast: (n) a meal eaten in the morning, the first of the day

It is part of the “wearing a coat” syndrome.Dictionary B

When I was a younger man, I often walked out into Ohio winters in a short-sleeved shirt, portraying to those lads and lasses around me that I was so engorged with virility that my body was nearly aflame.

Every attempt by adults to get me to wear a coat was eschewed as being “weak,” comically unnecessary.

I had much the same feeling about breakfast. Although I was a fat guy, I never ate breakfast. So all my food consumption fell within an eight-hour period–from noon to eight o’clock at night. Then I would go without any consumption of treats for sixteen hours.

It made me grumpy and actually ended up causing me to overeat–because once I was unleashed at the noon hour, I was a consuming hellion.

I don’t know why I didn’t want to eat breakfast. It was just that cool kids did not sit down in the morning in front of a plate and have their mommies make them bacon and eggs. I could have eaten cereal, but that would have required a bowl and retrieving milk from the refrigerator.

It was easier to walk out of my house coatless, nearly freezing to death, on an empty stomach–to prove that I was truly a beast of the wilderness.

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Bowl

Bowl: (n) a round, deep dish or basin used for food or liquid.

“Just give me a small bowl of ice cream.”Dictionary B

I’ve said that many times.

Or maybe it was a small bowl of spaghetti, popcorn, candy or some other notorious treat.

My friends understand what I mean by a small bowl. It isn’t one of those little three-finger types that you use for mints at a party, yet it’s not one of those huge Tupperware varieties occasionally employed for displaying fruit.

Even in the realm of cereal bowls, there’s quite a variety of renditions:

  • There’s the cereal bowl suited for a small child
  • The teenager
  • And then me

Yes–my bowl somewhat follows the Goldilocks Theory–it has to be “just right.”

Yet you have to be able to call it a “small bowl” even if it’s very large, so to those listening, you appear to be temperate of the highly caloric treat, so they can testify on your behalf later on when the scales of poundage groan their disagreement.

After all…you just had a small bowl.

 

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Alphabet

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Alphabet: (n) a set of letters or symbols in a fixed order, used to represent the basic sounds of a language

Sometimes I understand a concept and can even put into the works a plan of action, but become completely baffled during implementation.

Do you do that too?

Such was the case with a cereal called “Alphabets.”

As a kid, when I watched the commercial on television I saw children much like myself (except made more gaunt due to Hollywood’s requirements) sitting at a breakfast table, taking their little pieces of cereal and laying letters out on the table in front of them to make words.

It was perfect.

It was like going to school, feeling a sense of accomplishment upon completing an assignment–but then being able to eat it.

I was so impressed with what I saw during this advertisement that I begged my mother to buy me a box of Alphabets so that I, too, could sit in my nook and build my own personal dictionary made out of overly sweetened cereal product.

The only trouble was that every letter I pulled out seemed to be either an X or an O. Apparently the manufacturer found it easier to make those particular letters, so the box was not adequately stocked with all twenty-six representations used to form the English language.

They failed to share this in the commercial.

So by the end of breakfast I had dumped the entire box of cereal on the table in the quest of forming language, only to have my mother walk in and think that I was goofing around instead of pursuing the Rosetta Stone.

I can tell you of a certainty–there are absolutely no P’s, R’s or T’s in a box of Alphabets. I think I found two A’s, one E and four U’s.

I was vowelless.

So what I came up with were a bunch of Eastern-European-style words, a table covered with cereal and the dust that accompanies it, and an angry mother, who swore never to buy me another box of Alphabets.

The next week I found myself back to eating oatmeal, which, by the way, doesn’t evoke any other words than Y-U-C-K.