Mark's Blog

Here in the good ol' Land of Extremes, we have both no labelling of GMO-based foods, and a plethora of normal, delicious, organic breakfast cereals. Even here on a minor outlying island, you can get colored sugar bomg cereals for the kids, sweetend flakes with dried fruit and nut clusters for adults, simple puffed rice, wheat, quinoa, millet, or kamut (a heritage grain), and then all sorts of low sugar, high fiber, no wheat gluten, specialty cereals; all of these organic or mostly organic, or certified GMO-free.

However, when I met my then-future wife, she introduced me to do-it-yourself hot breakfast grains. It is easiest if you have a rice cooker, but you can do it on the stove top as well. The idea is that you often have some grains with dinner (or will get in the habit), usually rice (brown or white), but also wheat, couscous, quinoa, millet, barley, buckwheat, whatever they have in bulk a your favorite organic (or not) store. So cook extra so that you have about 2/3 cup leftover for every adult breakfast serving.

Leave it in the pan and cover with milk or soy milk (which is usually sweetented), and add raisins (or other dried fruid in small pieces) and chopped nuts if you like. Cover and leave in the fridge overnight, or even on the stove in your climate. The next morning, just heat it all up again, add more milk to get your preferred consistency, and sweeten to taste with sugar, honey, maple syrup, or confiture. You can also stir in spices such as cinnamon and add fresh fruit such as apples or bananas.

There is no guarantee the kids will like it, but you can experiment with ingredients they like. It might be more work than cereal in a box, but you do get a healthy and warm breakfast with your own ingredients in much less time than you'd think. The advantage of a rice cooker is that you can make it fairly quickly (10 min for white rice) in the morning if you don't have leftover grains.

Tim would probably eat macaroni or spaghetti for breakfast if we put Nutella on it. But they're not very easily enticed with whole grains.

Curiously, all three eat oatmeal. Diane and Emma even like dry rolled oats straight.

Pasta is just starch anyways, you could make hot sweet cereal out of it. And with either pasta or grains, you could melt a dollup of nutella in there, or make it with chocolate milk.

Oats are good like this too, it's just fancy oatmeal then, but you should be able to find organic oats in France--there's the BioNature store near place St Andre. Of course, now you're farther from the idea of quick and organic, but you should be getting closer to organic and tasty.