December 3, 2025
Congratulations, you made it
through to December! There was a time when my making such an announcement might
qualify as pure silliness.
These days, not so much.
Many of us here in North
America are about to experience the coldest temperatures of the year, to date.
Yes, we’re entering into a period of what I call “the sub-zeros”. And before
you ask if I mean Fahrenheit or Celsius, don’t. Because when it gets this cold,
it doesn’t really matter the scale we use to measure. Teeth-chattering is
teeth-chattering, in both of them.
Our latest grocery run saw us
stocking up on a few “oven ready” freezer meals, some family sized and some
individual. We don’t eat a lot of processed foods in this house. We just never
have, really. When we do purchase some, we are careful to pick ones with the
fewest unpronounceable additives.
In recent years, both David and
I have found that on any given day, and at any given time, one of us might feel
a bit chilly and in need of a hot meal. Now sometimes, I can whip that up
without difficulty. But then, there are the other days when I simply can’t.
Before daughter and I headed out
to get our groceries, David asked me to add one more item to the list: Red
River Cereal.
For those who don’t know, it’s
hot cereal—cracked wheat and rye and flax—mixed together that you then measure out,
add water to along with the proverbial pinch of salt, and simmer until it
reaches a state of “doneness”. It’s served usually with milk and a bit of
sweetener, the same as those more common hot breakfast cereals: oatmeal, oat
bran, cream of wheat, and cornmeal.
As a child I’d never been
offered this particular porridge. It never graced my mother’s kitchen shelves.
Once married, of course, we had it then because it was my husband’s favorite. I
recall the first time I bought it and was getting ready to make it. I opened the
box and poured out a cup of it. I stared down at the raw cereal for a long
moment. Then I looked up at David and said, “I now understand the name.”
He asked me how so. And I told
him that what I was looking at looked like what one might dredge from the
bottom of the Red River.
Yes, friends, I have always
been a smart ass. It truly is in my genes.
In fact, the cereal is named
for The Red River of the North, that flows through Winnipeg Manitoba, which is
where this cereal was first created in 1924.
I told David, of course, that
I would be happy to add it to the list, but with a caveat. I didn’t know if I
would find it as I hadn’t seen it in some time. However, while it wasn’t at the
store where we get most of our groceries, it was at one of our alterative
stores.
And now I’m shortly going to
make a pot of this porridge up, as we are entering into those damned sub-zeroes—and
because my husband asked me to.
And after that first pot, I
will set about experimenting on how David can easily cook it for himself in the
microwave. Yes, there are microwave directions on the package, but they didn’t
look convenient.
By that I mean, and for
example, experimentation with oatmeal showed me that three tablespoons of regular
three-minute oatmeal (we don’t get the instant stuff because, well, processed)
and a half cup of water, stirred together in a microwave safe cup requires one
minute and four seconds on high in our microwave to render a cup of oatmeal
ready for milk and sweetener.
It will likely take a few
tries before I find just the right formula to produce a satisfactory cup of hot
Red River cereal that David can make on his own.
But that is the very
definition of time well spent.
Love,
Morgan
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
No comments:
Post a Comment