breakfast

One of my fondest childhood memories is of nights when I stayed over at my grandparents house and in the morning Grandpa would make us Creamy Wheat.

I don't remember Grandma ever making it, oddly enough, because she's definitely the Master Cook in the family, always laying out a huge feast at holidays and special occasions. Grandpa carves the roast beast, but Grandma does pretty much everything else. I don't know if she didn't like cooking wheat porridge or if she felt it was a "Grandpa and the kids" thing, but in my memories, Grandpa is always the one at the stove.

Paul and I would get the step stool and stand to the left of the stove watching and "helping" as Grandpa heated the milk and stirred in the Cream of Wheat. He'd add sugar and cinnamon and we would sit at the kitchen table and eat our bowls together. The texture of Creamy Wheat is something like a very fine tapioca pudding- each grain plumps up and gets kinda sticky so it's just a little bit chewy, like good al dente pasta, but so soft that it melts in your mouth. Honestly, it doesn't look very appetizing; I'm not sure how Paul and I were convinced to try it initially, but we asked for it often.

Lately, I've been thinking about warm, soft, creamy wheat in the mornings. On our grocery store run last night, I picked up a box and made some this morning.

It's always shocking to me how keyed into memory our sense of smell is. The smell of warm milk took me right back to childhood in my grandparents' kitchen and when I added the cinnamon....I remembered exactly how the bowl would taste when I sat down to eat.


And it was just as excellent as I remembered.