Comfort Cereals

I recently discovered a podcast about people who love cereal as much as I do.

It got me thinking about my favorite comfort cereals.

Any time I feel tired or homesick or dehydrated, I make a bowl of my favorite cereal.

I can’t and won’t join the Protein for Breakfast club. I refuse. I love cereal too much.

I figured out my favorite, most comforting cereals and decided to write about them.

Grab a bowl and your favorite color-changing spoon.

Come on this cereal journey with me.

I can eat three or four bowls of Honey Bunches of Oats with Almonds at a time.

I once made fun of a book for making cinnamon the center of its mystery.

Turns out that book was right! The cinnamon in Honey Bunches of Oats with Almonds is super comforting and reminds me of home!

This cereal tricked me into both liking and eating granola. I’ve made its delicious bunches a core part of my personality.

I think one of my grandparents got me to like Kellog’s Raisin Bran. Raisins and bran flakes shouldn’t work together, much less in milk, yet here we are.

I will eat most brands/versions of Raisin Bran; a cereal with only two components is hard to mess up. I like this cereal best because of a strange phenomenon: I could swear Raisin Bran makes cereal milk colder.

I am never more hydrated than after I drink the milk from a bowl of Raisin Bran. I sometimes refill the bowl with milk two or three times to prolong my enjoyment (and quench my thirst.)

Raisin Bran makes milk colder! This is science!

When I was vegan (and, later, a lapsed vegetarian), I mourned the loss of marshmallows.

Specifically, I mourned the loss of Lucky Charms marshmallows.

As a kid, these weird, magical, freeze-dried marshmallows that got soft in cereal milk made me excited to wake up and eat breakfast.

Though I couldn’t fully appreciate the oats when I was younger, I always liked how they made the milk taste. Drinking Lucky Charms cereal milk is a centering experience. Forget mindfulness and try cereal milk.

Salt & Straw, my local ice cream shop, has a limited edition Lucky Charms flavor made with cereal milk. One bite takes me back to my family’s house on Delphi Loop. It’s my favorite type of time travel and I look forward to eating it every year.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t realize Cascadian Farm Organic Fruitful O’s had such bad reviews.

Now I feel silly for being so enamored with it.

It’s a bowl of naturally-flavored rainbow-colored corn AND oat rings that taste just sweet enough.

I never liked Froot Loops and I’m, at best, a nominal fan of Cheerios.

This cereal somehow combines the two in a way that makes my mouth happy.

At the best of times, I barely tolerate fruit; in cereal’s case, I welcome (fake) fruit flavors.

As such, there’s something really magical to me about Fruity Pebbles.

You’ve got these weird little rainbow shells that stack up in your spoon like scales and make your milk pink.

I know! It sounds gross when I type it out! This cereal still tastes so good!

When I was much younger, Pebbles were a Special Occasions Only cereal. In high school, I started putting Pebbles on frozen yogurt. Fruity Pebbles now exist in my mind as a special forbidden treat.

I feel like I’m pulling off the world’s best heist whenever I put a box in my shopping cart.

There’s an urban legend about the origin of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes that makes me giggle.

Regardless of whether the story is true or not, I can neither confirm nor deny Corn Flakes’ effectiveness in that respect. There are too many variables and the sample size is far too small.

Also, I like Corn Flakes better than Frosted Flakes. I know that’s weird.

It’s possible Corn Flakes are another cereal my grandparents enjoyed. I have foggy, perhaps-false memories of eating Corn Flakes in the morning before helping my grandpa chop wood.

Did this actually happen? Can someone confirm this?

I’m quite fond of Rice Krispies. I like their snap, crackle, and pop, and will always be there to claim any leftover boxes from a cereal sampler.

I also like Cocoa Krispies. No other chocolate cereal makes its cereal milk quite so delicious.

My heart, however, belongs to Rice Krispies Treats Cereal, a long-gone hallmark of my ’90s childhood.

This cereal captured the joy of making the world’s easiest dessert with my mom and grandma. It fit the forbidden taste of after-sports snacks in a cereal bowl. This cereal sparkled somehow (it wasn’t just the sugar.)

I eat Rice Krispies Treats to try to recreate this cereal experience. It comes close, but nothing will beat shaking clusters of marshmallow-y magic out of a turquoise box.

Kellogg’s has since produced an impostor version of Rice Krispies Treats Cereal.

I have chosen to act like it doesn’t exist.