Look, I've blogged every day for a whole week!

This morning I had French toast for breakfast.

This may seem like a strange thing to blog about, except that almost anyone who knows me well also knows that I’m pretty attached to my morning bowl of oatmeal. I don’t remember exactly when I discovered oatmeal. Growing up, I hated oatmeal mornings, but sometime during my undergraduate years I rediscovered the food, and I haven’t looked back.

I have a special oatmeal pot, a little one that’s exactly the right size for a single serving of quick-cooking rolled oats. I have a special oatmeal canister, a clear plastic container with a blue lid that never has less than enough oatmeal to last me until my next trip to the grocery store. I have a special oatmeal half-cup measure that lives inside the oatmeal canister because that makes a lot more sense than using and washing a measuring cup every time I have breakfast. I have a special tablespoon that lives in my special brown sugar container which I use only for scooping brown sugar into my bowl in the morning. And I have a special oatmeal bowl, a light blue ceramic happy face bowl from Macey’s which must never, ever, ever break because I’ve already broken the yellow one and the green one and don’t think they make them anymore (and if you have one I will buy it from you, because I don’t know what I’d eat oatmeal out of if I lost mine).

The French toast was a whim. I was at the Kroger up in Bloomfield Hills last night on the way to the temple because I’d neglected to pack a dinner, and I spied a loaf of thick slices of cinnamon swirl bread. They don’t have that at our Kroger, and I was hungry, and it looked really good so I bought some. I didn’t, however, buy a real dinner because I couldn’t find anything suitable, and so I decided to just have a late dinner. This meant that while I was working at the temple I was hungry, and so I kept thinking about food, and since I’d just bought that loaf of bread I kept thinking that it would make really good French toast. After spending so much time thinking about it, I almost felt obligated to follow through this morning. I was right – it did make good French toast. But it wasn’t the same.

But I’ve been thinking about this. It’s not really that I like oatmeal that much. It’s just that I somehow got in the habit of eating oatmeal every morning, and I become easily entrenched in habits when it comes to food. It’s the reason that with all the many, many eating choices around campus, in the last few months I have found myself getting the same turkey sandwich every single time I neglect to bring my lunch to campus. I know there’s lots of good food out there (I’ve had a lot of it before), but I also know that the turkey sandwich will taste good, will be cheap enough that I won’t feel guilty for spending the money, will fill me up until the next meal without making me feel too full, and will basically satisfy my lunch requirements on every dimension. I don’t know that about everything else, and why take the risk that I will be less than satisfied? It’s the same with oatmeal. There are many mornings when I don’t actually like oatmeal any more than I like other breakfast options I can think of, but what I do know is that oatmeal for breakfast works, and why mess with something that works?