It's very difficult in my house to successfully eat a bowl of cereal. Oh, it's easy enough to select the cereal, put it in a bowl, pour milk over it, grab a spoon and sit down to eat. We eat breakfast at the counter. That makes sense as we are usually in rush to get off to work. So, eating breakfast, scanning the newspaper, wiping the counter and putting the bowls in the dish washer is efficient, logical and pretty straightforward. I've heard that many people do exactly that every morning without incident.

I suspect that the difference between their house and mine is that they don't have two eighteen pound cats who like to join them for cereal. Well, join is not quite the operative word. The more accurate word would be "hog". That's because they go whole-hog with paws, snouts, tongues, and tails into our cereal bowls anyway they can. You might imagine that they are just after the milk. That would be incorrect. They did not achieve their enormous girth on milk alone!

I think cereal is a marvelous food. It can be either comforting or refreshing as the first meal of the day. It can be either just nourishing such as some of those straw-like health brands, or nourishing and tasty. It comes hot or cold, with milk or plain, with yogurt if you like, with fruit perhaps, and goes with all other breakfast food. It can be all or part of a mid-day snack, it can be used in place of bread crumbs, it can be an ingredient for cookies, candies or cakes.

Cereal's natural versatility and adaptability is surpassed only in the number of varieties there are today. The Kellogg brothers had no idea in 1897, when they invented corn flakes as a health aid, where this journey would go. Hot cereals, which were made from boiled grains, had been around for centuries, but the first cold cereal came to be only in 1863 and was called "granula".

Understandably, I think, my favorite winter time cereal is steel cut oatmeal with raisins, brown sugar, bananas and milk. Now that sets one up for the day! The quantity is important to be properly set up and that quantity would be "lots". The oatmeal retains some chewiness, as do the raisins, while the milk and banana just slip right down. Sugar makes everything better.

In summertime, if I'm dieting, which is frequently, I like Special K. The quantities I eat wouldn't quite qualify as a diet amount, which is why I am always dieting. But, I do find crunching on that very slightly sweetened cereal under icy-cold milk, with some raspberries added for color and flavor to be delicious.

I also enjoy Rice Chex, Cheerios, Go-Lean (who am I kidding?), and Shredded Wheat. On a really rough day, nothing soothes quite like Cream of Wheat with a few almonds and dried apricots. No matter what kind of day it is, I like to stick my hand in any open cereal box for a quick treat.

So, how are we managing to eat cereal at our house? My dearly beloved continues to make valiant attempts to cooperatively share the breakfast counter with the cats, while still getting some cereal into his mouth. He's making effective use of his elbows. I, on the other hand, have given up. I eat my cereal standing up. It works well enough until one of the little darlings jumps on my shoulder...

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