Saturday, August 26, 2017

Breakfast is broken

It's back to school time! Betty Crocker's Good and Easy Cookbook (1971) suggests changing up the morning routine to make sure the kids get off to school fully nourished. If you want to make the kids happy (and make their teachers want to murder you), there is always this sweet option:

You might be thinking, "Hey! That looks like a chocolate shake."

There's a reason for that.


It is, in fact, a chocolate shake made with a pint of chocolate ice cream. It's okay because the Cocoa Puffs make it breakfast-y!

If the kids are in a rush, you might want to just send them out with a cereal bar. In the '70s, you had to make those things yourself. If the kids insisted on peanut butter and jelly everything, then these might fit the bill...


...if that weirdly overpowering artificial fruit flavor in Trix counts as jelly, and sugar held together with more sugar counts as nutrition. (And it does! Cf. Cocoa-Cereal Milk Shake)

If you want something slightly more nutritionally sound (but just as weird), then the boringly-named Breakfast Bars might work...

...not that I've ever thought mixing the peanut butter and marshmallows with raisins, dry milk, Cheerios, and "orange-flavored instant breakfast drink" was a solid plan. It sounds almost sane-- peanut butter, milk, fruit, whole grains-- until you hit the (what I assume is a generic name for) Tang.

The best way to motivate the kids to get out of the house when they'd rather stay home and play with their Weebles might be to serve them something that won't make them inclined to linger. Do baked apples sound good on a crisp, edge-of-fall morning?


Well, the closest you're going to get is crushed Wheaties dumped over some applesauce. Take it or leave it, kid.

And of course, I'm saving the best recipe to motivate the kids to get the hell out for last:


Yep: Soup 'n Cereal! If the inherent nastiness of having a can of tomato soup dumped over corn flakes or puffed rice isn't enough to make the kids run screaming out to the bus stop, the knowledge that mom is in the kind of mood that makes this seem like an appropriate breakfast should be. When mom gets that look in her eyes as she's pouring hot red soup over the Cheerios, run!

6 comments:

  1. Wow, where to start? I'm so glad mom went for letting the kids fix their own breakfast of dry cereal and milk. The first recipe reminded me of the local news stories about how all elementary school kids are getting free breakfast - because most school breakfasts are pure sugar from what I hear. Trix covered in peanut butter... Eew! The breakfast bar one reminded me that one of my 4-H books had a breakfast bar recipe. I think it involved corn syrup, peanut butter, dry milk and rice Krispies. I made it and it wasn't all bad, but weird enough that we would never want them again. Finally, I could see the tomato soup over cereal as some sort of revenge on a kid who insists on dumping ketchup over everything they eat. And to think some people think that cold pizza is a gross breakfast.

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    1. Yeah-- Trix covered in peanut butter got me. I loooove peanut butter, but Trix would ruin it for me.

      I might have found the recipe for the breakfast thing. They were called "Skillet Balls" (Heh!). I see the powdered milk, peanut butter, and cereal (reader's choice, so you could have used Rice Krispies), but no corn syrup. Just sugar. Of course, there may have been different recipes in different projects.

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    2. That probably is the recipe. I could have remembered the corn syrup part wrong. I seem to remember a really strange sheen when done, so I thought corn syrup was involved. I think I took them to a meeting as a "treat". Thankfully everyone understood when someone said they made the meeting's treat from one of their project books you should eat it politely and not say how bad it was. We all knew that the source was the problem and it was a way of unloading some marginal recipes on someone other than your family.

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    3. I'm pretty sure someone else brought those same balls to a meeting as a "treat." They were pretty popular for foisting off onto others.

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  2. I have this book! I defintely skipped over that chapter :D

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    1. This is only scratching the surface. Betty really went wild with breakfast in that one. You should definitely check out the chapter.

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