Breakfast of Champions

Good morning,

Every time I’m in the grocery store, I always take a minute to glance wistfully at the elegant tin of Irish steel cut oats on the top shelf of the “health food” section. They exude an aura of ancient heartiness. I imagine myself as some sort of historical homemaker ladling out bowlfuls of thick gruel to stick to my family’s ribs when they leave the coziness of our thatched cottage to go off to an honest day’s work across the foggy moor. The only thing that has prevented me from living out this fantasy, beyond the lack of thatching, moors and family members in my daily life, has been the prohibitive cost of the can of oats. The oats in the cardboard box are half as expensive, but 90% of the charm and desirability of the oats in the tin is the tin itself. I had a friend who’d saved the oat tin to keep his pencils in and, boy howdy, did it ever look classy. Yup, there sure is something special about that traditional lettering telling of how John McCann’s oats won the award at the International Exhibition in Philadelphia from the Centennial Commission in 1876. Good golly, that tin sure would look swell sitting on my kitchen shelf…

It really does. I can say that with absolute certainty since I broke down yesterday and bought the tin of oats. I figured I deserved the fancy tin and would eventually buy it anyway. Oooh, I boiled me up a mess of porridge this morning with brown sugar and a drizzle of pure Quebecois maple syrup.

It was a wise choice.