Right now as I type this, I’m eating a bowl of plain, dry Cheerios. This is one of my comfort foods. But when I tell this to people, they look at me like I just stepped off a Martian spacecraft. Am I really that fucked up for enjoying some plain dry cereal? I hate the taste of milk and have hated it since I was a little kid - people always react, upon hearing this, as if I just stuck an electric cattle prod up their ass and pressed the button. What’s so unusual about it? The taste and texture of milk is gross to me, and I can’t explain it any more than that.
So I’ve always eaten my cereal dry. Cap’n Crunch, Chex, Apple Jacks, Frosted and Corn flakes, and Cheerios - any cereal, pretty much. One of my favorites as a kid was Batman Cereal, despite a lot of people not liking it. Always without milk.
I, too, would rather have cereal dry. My favorites are cheerios and frosted mini-wheats. I don’t eat it often, though. My youngest child prefers his cereal dry, as well.
There are some cereals I’ll always eat dry. They’re mainly pre-sweetened cereals like Cap’n Crunch, Lucky Charms, or Honeycomb which, for me, are mainly snacking cereals as opposed to breakfast cereals. With non-sweatened cereals like Rice Krispies, Corn Flakes, Kix, or Cheerios, I’ll add a dab of milk just to dampen them. Honey Bunches of Oats (a semi-sweet cereal) usually gets more milk while Cocoa Krispies gets thoroughly drowned so it’ll fully yield its chocolately milk goodness.
I love eating Quaker Crunchy muesli dry.
But after about half a bowl my jaw feels like it is going to drop off.
I by the way also hate milk and am not a particularly big fan of yoghurt.
For me it depends on which cereal. Until I was introduced to granola on a hiking trip (in the 70’s) I had no idea how good dry cereal minus the milk and sugar could be. After that I went for the heartier (more fattening) cereals and preferred them dry and as snacks versus meals. But whenever the choice is Cheerios, Shredded Wheat, Corn Flakes, Wheaties or any other unsweetened stuff, I revert to the milk and sugar toppings from before. I have never been all that fond of pre-sweetened cereals nor all the kooky flavors available since the Count Chocula and Boo-berry days.
These days I don’t eat much dry cereal of any kind. Oatmeal, grits, cream of wheat and that sort of thing, a little. But I’m mostly into bagels.
I hate milk and it hates me. Usually I don’t eat cereal either, but lately I’ve been going for the high-fiber stuff. You shouldn’t eat a lot of fiber with no liquid, so I drink a glass of Crystal Light along with my dry cereal. Mmm-mm!
I only like cereal with milk or yogurt, but my husband is a milk hater. He loves cereal though, and regularly eats dry bowls of cereal for breakfast. Healthy & non-healthy ones, it doesn’t matter.
I’m a dry cereal girl. People make fun of me, but I don’t mind. My mom has gotten oddly proud of it. “No, she doesn’t need any milk. She likes it dry. That’s just the way she likes it!” My favorites are Cheerios and Crispix. When I drank a lot of Coke, I loved my Coke and Crispix. Easy to get distracted and pick up the wrong vessel, though, particularly since I often eat the cereal in a cup - you dip your fingers into the “cereal cup” and it’s wet and fizzy.
Whenever I have cereal, I have it dry and I like it that way. Frosted Mini Wheats make a great snack all by themselves, but I’ve even enjoyed Grape Nuts this way, too. Granola, of course, is an easy one. I don’t often buy cereal, but when I do it’s for snacking purposes rather than getting poured into a bowl and eaten all mushy.
I also refrain from cooking my instant oatmeal. I like it slightly dampened and uncooked. Mm.
I have been made fun of my whole life for eating dry cereal. And I love, love, love milk. But my mom was very strict, and the only way she would allow us to put sugar on our cereal (she would not buy sweetened cereal for years) was if we had milk…because otherwise the sugar would just accumulate at the bottom of the bowl and then you’d be eating straight sugar, and we couldn’t have that! (Anything that is fun or pleasurable or indulgent was frowned on as wasteful…though we were allowed to dip tomatoes in sugar…). So if you wanted sugar, you had to use milk…but you also had to drink the milk left over at the bottom of the bowl…with crumbs of cereal floating in it, and all that sugar…ick. So I just stopped eating cereal altogether. When I got older, I started again, but used yogurt, or just ate it dry with a glass of clean, cold, unsweetened milk on the side. Even now, I keep a box of Trader Joe’s Cheerio-type cereal with dried strawberries right by the computer.
Oh, yeah, that was the other thing…when the dried strawberries started showing up in cereal back in the sixties, she wouldn’t let me eat them dry, because she felt they should be soaked in the milk as well. And I adore dried strawberries…dry, like nature intended!
