Part of a healthy breakfast...

Writing this Friday's Top 5 , I realized how many of my ideas for these lists revolve around food. I have a whole list of ideas for my Friday posts and I've had to pace out the food ones for fear of sounding obsessed. Well, dear readers, I'm done pretending. I LOVE FOOD. My husband and I read and discuss Bon Appetit, Gourmet and the Williams Sonoma catalogue the way some people do the New York Times. So take this as your warning, my Friday post will, more often than not, be based on some kind of edible and I will not be ashamed.

This Friday's Top 5 - CEREAL! Who doesn't love cereal? My kids, for starters. Don't get me wrong, my kids do enjoy cereal, but these little freaks will only eat it dry. I am not lying when I tell you my oldest eats Frosted Mini Wheats dry for breakfast. Do you want a side of sand with that? My own childhood history with cereal is one of forbidden love. I grew up in a household where Sugar Bear and Captain Crunch were personae non grata. Our choices were limited to a selection of non-sugared, healthy options such as Cheerios, Corn Flakes and Rice Krispies. As a parent, I can appreciate and do replicate this decision. The most popular cereals in my house are Kix and the above mentioned shredded wheat, but what I still to this day do not understand about my parents' cereal decision is that we were allowed to add as much table sugar as we wanted! What's the point in that? So after my sister and I wolfed down our morning bowl of healthy Cheerios we were left with a thick silt composed of sugar and milk to enjoy as dessert. My molars cry out at the memory. It is no surprise then that my sister and I became quite covetous of the junkier cereals and were known to consume entire boxes of Count Chocula during sleepovers at our Aunt Janie's. To prevent my kids from becoming cereal junkies I have amended the cereal rule I borrowed from my parents. Sugar cereal may be eaten, but only as dessert, after dinner. Of course, they still don't add milk. So without further ado, the list of cereals I most desired as a child and enjoy as an adult. Feel free to comment and tell me about some of your own.

Top 5 Cereals of All Time

5. Special K - Didn't think a healthy cereal would make the list, did ya'? Well I am including this one begrudgingly only because I ate it in such mass quantities in the 90's I'd feel like a fraud if I didn't. Special K became a food group to me in college as I lived in my sorority house for three years where meals were prepared by possibly the worst cook to hold a spatula since Chef Boyardee. Special K became my "entree" cereal. It had protein and the quality oshared by 99% of things I ate in college - being low fat. I laughed out loud when they developed that Special K Diet and put it on the box. My Special K diet involved eating ten bowls for dinner (usually followed by half an Entemann's low-fat pound cake) and wondering why I was gaining weight. Regardless of its diet consciousness I give a shout-out to The K for saving me from the horror that was Kathy's raspberry chicken (I swear to God it was day-glow pink).

4. Fruity Pebbles - This cereal has the panache of being tied to a popular cartoon series. While kids today still enjoy the cereal, I'm sure they have no idea who the two squat men wearing dresses are on the box. I love the taste of Fruity Pebbles, just sweet enough without turning the milk into pure corn syrup. I also love that they spell the word "fruit" correctly, unlike Froot Loops - although I'm sure that's for coolness purposes rather than legal honesty about actual fruit content. My only issue with FP, and the reason they are at #4 is the fact that if you don't scarf them down in the first five minutes they melt into a rainbow colored sludge that looks like it has already been partially digested. I think my brother in-law used some when he made a batch of fake vomit in middle school. And don't think I equally love Cocoa Pebbles. They are the bastard step-brother of FP - zero chocolate flavor to make up for that hideous sogginess.

3. Lucky Charms - Boy there's nothing I love more than a politically incorrect cartoon character targeted at my heritage. Lucky the Leprechaun, with his terrible fake brogue is almost enough to put me off this fabulous cereal. What's the draw here? The marshmallows, of course. What kid does not want to eat dehydrated, then re-hydrated marshmallows for breakfast? The cereal pieces themselves are non-descript in flavor, but they act as a nice backdrop to the sweetness of the "charms". Speaking of, I have no idea what half the damn shapes are in this cereal now they've changed so many times. Remember the big advertising campaign during Saturday morning TV when they added purple horseshoes? Madness! I think there's a rainbow and a pot of gold and, perhaps, a rabbit's foot now. Soon it'll just be a big box of marshmallows, forget the cereal! Kind of like when Cap'n Crunch came out with Oops! All Berries - freakin' disgusting.

2. Count Chocula - As I mentioned earlier, CC was one of my dream cereals as a child. Just the right amount of cocoa flavor and enough coating to turn the milk into a light version of chocolate milk. Like Lucky Charms, it also had the weird, dehydrated marshmallows, but in CC you really couldn't tell what they're supposed to be. Bats? Clouds? Moons? They were amorphous, white bits and they were delicious. Now, the original version of my childhood had cereal pieces in the shape of the Count's head (didn't you love that The Count looked like the creepy older cousin of the The Count from Sesame Street?), in the current recipe they're the same shape, but they've added some kind of coating to make the cereal bits almost impenetrable to milk and this makes eating it a bit of a dental hazard. Sometimes food technology can go too far. Regardless, I occasionally like to fulfill a childhood dream and eat a whole box just because I can.

1. Cap'n Crunch - Oh, the Cap'n. I can still recall mornings at Aunt Janie's jumping out of bed and racing to the kitchen to tear open the new box of CC, bought especially for me, and pour myself a trough of corn-syrupy goodness. Using a serving spoon I'd shovel in that first mouthful and begin the assault on my hard pallet. How can a cereal that tastes so good inflict such deep flesh wounds on the oral tissue of children? Who is the masochist who decided that squares with jagged corners were the way to go? After a weekend at my aunt's, pudding was all I could eat for a week. No matter what agonies I suffered afterwards it was all worth it. Cap'n Crunch is made out of that vaguely corn-ish cereal base they used for all the limited edition cereals (Pac Man, Donkey Kong) because it's easy to shape and it's damn tasty. I also enjoy the variations of CC available, most notably, Peanut Butter. As stated above though, the Crunchberry variety is breakfast in hell. And the name. Don't you just love the way you really believe the Cap'n is a salty sea dog all because of that abbreviation? Aye, aye! He is a captain - captain of my cereal-loving heart.

Now that you know all of my favorites, there are two worth mentioning in the hopes I will spare you the experience of having to taste them yourselves. First, the horrifying Golden Grahams. I was all hopped up the Saturday my mother finally let me buy these. The experience of actually eating them left much to be desired. You know how graham crackers disintegrate the minute they touch milk? Try cutting a graham cracker up into a hundred pieces and you can imagine the INSTANT bowl of crap you have on your hands with this cereal. Second, Corn Pops. I actually got the recipe from their corporate headquarters - "Cut Styrofoam peanuts into bite-sized pieces. Dip in corn syrup. The end."

I hope you enjoyed this Friday's installment as much as I did. Why not go revisit a childhood favorite? You're a grown-up now - eat the whole box if you want. I plan on picking up a box of Froot Loops for my girls, or as they call it "bird cereal" and encouraging them to, for the love of the Cap'n, add some milk.

PS - To refer back to this post's title, who the hell could eat all that food? Cereal and toast and fruit and juice? Can we say "childhood obesity"?