Good morning dear readers. In between slurping noodles and eating offal it has come to my attention that the good folks at General Mills launched the first-ever National Cereal Lover’s Week today. As part of the festivities the company has created a web site, Hello, Cereal Lovers, and enlisted the aid of celebrity chef Justin Warner of Do or Dine. Warner can be seen in the above video making a lovely sounding scallop ceviche that uses Chex as a textural component and a not so lovely sounding Cocoa Puff Carbonara.
“I’ve loved cereal since before I had teeth, and as a chef, I’m always looking for inspiration and mixing unexpected ingredients to create knockout new flavor combinations,” said Warner. That carbonara surely falls into the unexpected category.
As a kid, I too loved cereal, both the sweet sugar bombs like Golden Grahams and Lucky Charms and the crunchy creations like Crispix and Grape Nuts. The thing is in college I ate so much cereal that I hardly ever eat it for breakfast these days. Here’s what I’d like to know: What’s your favorite breakfast cereal? Tell me in the comments, or hit me on the Twitter, @JoeDiStefano.
I think cereal is one of those foodstuffs I will never understand. Growing up in India I never ate cereal — we always ate real food. And now having lived here for a while it just seems like a way for big corporations to make a lot of money by way of compromising people’s health.
I hear you Premshree. So what was a typical breakfast for you back home?
My parents are South Indian (Kerala), so it was very common to eat idli (with chutney and sambar); puttu with kadala or boiled plantains; sometimes appam with ishtu (stew); rava (semolina) upma; dosas (with chutney and sambar). We also ate eggs in various forms: scrambled, sunny side up, or as a masala omelette (very common on the streets in cities like Bombay). And breakfast is almost always accompanied with chai or filter coffee — the latter being common in south India.