Breakfast With Tony

Early one Sunday morning I called my girlfriend. She didn’t answer the phone because she was eating cereal and didn’t want it to get soggy. We talked after she ate. When you’re a kid you don’t care so much if your cereal’s stale or soggy so long as it comes with a prize. As a kid I didn’t care if the cereal was good for me so long as it had Tony the Tiger on the cereal box. Tony was great and if he told me Frosted Flakes was great, I believed him. I ate Life cereal because, Mikey (the kid, who didn’t like anything, ate it) and I believed in Mikey.  

No matter what type of cereal I eat, there has to be cold milk to go with it. There are two types of people when it comes to pouring milk into cereal. Type one: the all-at-once pourer, which describes me. I pour milk into my cereal and return the milk to the fridge. I stir my cereal so it’s dampened with milk. Eating cereal like this leaves no time for idle chit-chat because if you engage in conversation cereal will become soggy.                    

Type two: the little-bit-at-a-time pourer, which is my husband. This method suits him since he spends an hour at the breakfast table. He pours a little bit of milk and eats a little bit of cereal as he reads the paper. When the milk supply is depleted he adds a little bit more milk and eats a little bit more cereal. For a man who attacks lunch and dinner meals like pit stops for fuel only and not enjoyment, I find it amazing he’ll spend an hour with a bowl of cereal. Since he eats slowly and is a little-bit-at-a-time milk pourer, the milk is always warm by the time he’s done.

The only thing worse than warm milk is curdled milk, which you find out is bad only after you’ve poured it into your bowl of cereal. Looking at chunks of milk floating on the top of your cereal is not a good start to the day. If that was the last of the milk then you have a decision to make – eat dry cereal or pancakes with syrup.

When it comes to eating pancakes with syrup there are two types of people: the one who pours the syrup all over their pancakes and the one who likes the syrup on the side for dipping their pancakes. In case you’re wondering, my husband and I eat our pancakes much the same way we eat our cereal.