Almond Joy Makes Cereal Choice Easy

For the last three mornings, I’ve had a new infatuation in my life.

I wake up so excited every day. I can’t wait to get downstairs and experience this thrilling new sensation. And yet …

When I open the cupboard, I feel somehow, disloyal, to my old standby. There she sits, patiently, just like she has my whole life, always there, always reliable, always delicious. Yet this new one, she’s so exciting, so fresh, so crisp, so different, I just can’t help myself. Let me tell you: This new one, she’s got SLICED AND TOASTED ALMONDS.

Oh my goodness. She even has a brown sugar glaze.

I don’t know how many decades my old reliable Grape Nuts has been there for me. Yet I’ve been shoving her aside and grabbing that Oatmeal Crisp Almond all week, and you know what? I don’t care. I WANT THOSE ALMONDS.

Sigh. It’s a terrible thing to be fickle about one’s breakfast, but these are the kinds of passions engendered by cereal, mankind’s most perfect processed food product. I knew that I was out of control when my first thought upon waking up was, “What’s that noise downstairs? Is someone into the Oatmeal Crisp Almond? Well, I have news for you, little Missy, if that box is empty when I get downstairs, there’ll be hell to pay.”

But I have decided to be honest about my emotions. I have decided to come out of the cupboard on this issue. A famous poet once listed the ingredients for bliss as, “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou,” to which I might amend, “A cup of joe, a bowl of Cheerios, and the sports section.” (I am easily blissed.)

Like most deep emotions, this one has roots in our childhood. Kids, being open and honest, are absolutely unabashed about their love for cereal. They debate it on the elementary school playground (“Lucky Charms.” “No, I think Trix.” “Yet we must not dismiss Cap’n Crunch.”) They sit in front of Saturday morning cereal ads, transfixed with the possibilities that await them if only they could talk Mom into buying sugared cereals. At the grocery store, they throw deep, passionate, sincere tantrums when Mom refuses, of course, to buy sugared cereals.

Then we usually go through a post-adolescent phase, or should I say, Post adolescent phase, when we are off on our own for the first time and discover that cereal is the ideal food substance mainly because it requires absolutely no preparation, unless you call slicing open that plastic inner liner “preparation.” This means that we can sleep in an extra 10 minutes, because breakfast will require only about four minutes, total, from slicing open the liner to fishing for the last floating corn flake.

Somewhere along the way, we discover the more old-fashioned pleasures of cooked cereal: oatmeal and Cream of Wheat. The best cereal I ever had was the genuine Scottish steel-cut oatmeal at Sun Mountain Lodge, although maybe this only seemed like the best, since I was calorie-starved from skiing 20 kilometers the day before. Yet cooked cereals, like waffles, pancakes, eggs and hash browns, are strictly weekend and holiday treats. Who wants to fuss over a stove on a routine workday? Weekdays: that’s when dry cereal comes into its glory.

Over the years, I have tried many cereals, yet I always come back to two old standbys. One is Cheerios, with its wholesome O’s, and the other is Grape Nuts, which I love the most because it is so crunchy, dense and nutty. Or maybe I love it because it is the solid equivalent of beer, being essentially dried malted barley wort.

Yet let me tell you about this Oatmeal Crisp Almond. The culinary geniuses at General Mills have figured out a way of taking oatmeal and drying it out into clusters, and then mixing it with whole-grain oat flakes, and then throwing in SLICED AND TOASTED ALMONDS. Have I mentioned that it has a brown-sugar glaze?

So that’s the Cereal Of The Moment around our house this week. But I wonder: Will Oatmeal Crisp Almond have staying power? Will it be there in two weeks, two years, 20 years? Probably not. My wife informs me that she purchased it only because she had coupons. So when the coupons expire and our infatuation wears off, there, in the back of the cupboard, will be my Grape Nuts.

It has no brown-sugar glaze, but it has a more rare and valuable quality. It never goes stale. In cereal as in life, staying power is what truly matters.