Breakfast thoughts

[hummingwolf]

Little packets of instant oatmeal (especially maple & brown sugar) remind me of camping trips with my parents, sitting in the motor home looking out at the trees of wherever we were. Mom & Dad fixing their coffee, pulling out maps, deciding what we would do today. Or maybe just fixing the coffee, planning to spend the day relaxing at the campsite, reading magazines, doing cross-stitch or macrame, playing darts with the board they carried everywhere. Instant grits bring up the same memories.

Plain rolled oats, however, bring no particular memories. They're just a cheap and filling food. To make plain oatmeal interesting, you have to add things to it, fruit or peanut butter or something. It's too much like work.

Dry cereal is a typical morning food. Eat a bowl of cereal, a piece or two of fruit, then get dressed and go off to school. Though "typical" sounds boring, there's nothing wrong with the typical things. I've got a weakness for fancier cereals, ones with dried bananas or cranberries and clusters of rolled oats. But Grape Nuts are good too, if you've got good amber honey to trickle into the bowl.

On certain weekend mornings growing up: Pancakes! My father had an old cookbook full of a variety of pancake recipes. What would this week's pancakes be? Blueberry pancakes, buttermilk pancakes, banana pancakes, buckwheat pancakes, whole wheat pancakes? What kind of syrup do we have? Store-bought maple-flavored syrup, real New York maple syrup given to us by my brother, Karo corn syrup, some funky flavored syrup that sounded like a good idea at the time, blackstrap molasses? Sometimes Dad would get out the food colorings. We might have green pancakes and ham. Any color was good except blue (there are no blue foods).

When I was small, I was also curious. Before my parents woke up on Saturdays, while the cartoons were playing on TV, I'd go into the kitchen cabinets, get out the milk, protein supplement, and a wide variety of flavorings, and make my own breakfast. Since I also liked to experiment with food colorings, I would also usually make a big mess as well. After a while, my parents banned me from playing with the food colorings and flavorings on Saturday mornings.

Comments

[dcjensen.livejournal.com]

Good post, CB. Very evocative. Very reminicent of my family when I was little. Some exceptions, of course, like protein supplements, for instance. Not big in my family.

I have notes somewhere on a column I planned to do someday based upon Maple and Brown Sugar and Apples and Cinnimon oatmeal and camping and family. Maybe I should still write one.

Good times, Good times....

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Some exceptions, of course, like protein supplements,

My parents were Amway distributors. We tried pretty much every Nutrilite supplement in our house at one time or another. The protein powder became a household staple when we realized that it helped stabilize my mother's blood sugar. (If she ate plain pancakes, she was fine. If she ate pancakes with syrup, she'd pass out. If the pancakes had protein added to the powder, she could eat them with syrup and be fine.)

You should totally write that column.

[missprune.livejournal.com]

those camping trips sound like a wonderful way to do vacation. BUt speaking of no blue food, how about blueberries? Blue cheese!

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Blueberries can be blue on the outside, but the inside is usually reddish, greenish, or even white, depending on the kind of blueberry. If you cook them in something, what you've put them in will turn red or green--not blue unless you add blue food coloring.

I agree with you on bleu cheese, and always used that example. But nobody in the family except for Mom and me would accept that bleu cheese is actually a food!

[coffeegrace.livejournal.com]

Maple and brown sugar instant oatmeal reminds me of camping too. In fact, instant flavored oatmeal is the only kind of oatmeal I like.

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Seems like instant oatmeal reminds a lot of people of camping. Maybe it's just a great camping food, even if regular oatmeal is less appealing!

What were your camping trips like?

[coffeegrace.livejournal.com]

Well, my family went camping very often during the months where the weather was good for it (we still do, actually). We canoe camped on many of the Florida rivers, back-packed, and car camped. Canoe camping was my favorite, we'd pile all our stuff into two canoes and head out into the wilds. When it was warm and the river was wide and deep enough I would swim alongside the canoe. Then we'd find a nice spot along the bank to set up camp and swim or hike till dark. I loved to wander into the woods and read or draw. At night we'd always have a fire and have roast marshmellows for dessert, and sing folk and bluegrass songs while Dad played the guitar. Mom and I would usually go on a dawn hike (after our coffee and oatmeal) because that's the best time to spot animals. :-)

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Canoe camping sounds like fun! I never had the chance to go canoeing much, but it was *usually* fun. Sitting around the campfire singing sounds nice too!