Bungalow Breakfast

Currently listening to Glad, "You Put This Love in my Heart".

This morning I woke up slow and easy with the sun, rolled out of bed, (used the bathroom,) and went upstairs to fix myself some breakfast. The menu today? Homemade almond milk over homemade cereal with dried currants and plump, ripe raspberries.

Say what!?

That's right: I made my own cereal yesterday. It was actually really easy. Have you ever wondered how they make cereal? They actually have machines that manipulate the chemicals of the grain and spit it out in the most unnatural fashion to achieve the specific shapes for each brand. (Read more about it in the "Breakfast Cereals" section of this article.) It's terribly unhealthy. But does that mean that you can't eat cold breakfasts anymore? For awhile now, that's what I've been doing. It takes a bit of time to prepare a hot breakfast every morning. Usually I've been baking johnny cake or Amish baked oatmeal, or cooking up a pot of cream cereal and reheating it for the next few days or so. But if you know me, you know that I LOVE milk and cereal. Could I really go the rest of my life without it?

So I googled it up, and found a recipe for homemade cereal. You make up a dough, spread it all over parchment paper on a cookie sheet, and bake yourself one giant cracker. Then you turn down the oven, break the cracker into little pieces, and cook it awhile more until you get flakes! No crazy, pressurized, molecular manipulation here! Now, I didn't follow the directions very well, and ended up with pretty thick flakes and not very many of them. You're supposed to divide the dough and do two sheets and I kept it together and filled one. But they were still pretty delicious this morning. The whole thing took a little over 30 minutes to make - and it would probably still be under an hour if I did two trays like I was supposed to.

The almond milk was the easiest thing ever, too. I soaked 1/2 cup of raw almonds in 2 cups of water for the better part of the day, then came back and blended it into a paste, adding the water as I went to keep it thinned. When I had finished, I poured it into a .8 liter stainless steel bottle, adding a bit of extra water to fill it up. I just have to shake it up before I pour it out, and it turns out pretty good! Now, I think I might need to add some sort of sweetener, but I didn't know what I wanted to add, and as long as I don't try to drink it on its own (as opposed to having it over cereal or using it in baking) I don't think it's that bad. And again, the prep time was very small.

I think I may have found a new weekly activity.