We went shopping on Monday after I arrived home from my annual caching trip and I picked up the necessities for the next two weeks. I also picked up a few “not so necessary” items, one of which was a box of Kashi Go Lean Truly Vanilla oatmeal.

Now, as part of my daily eating routine I have a cup or so of cereal and lately I’ve been eating other versions of Kashi’s Go Lean dry line like Honey Almond Flax or Original Crunch. I don’t do well with most milk products so I eat half dry and half on top of my “Key Lime Pie” yogurt.

So today I figured would be a good day to eat a bowl of this stuff. I’ve never been a big oatmeal fan as I’ve always been partial to the comforting feelings I get eating Farina or Cream of Wheat instead but I figured this wouldn’t be much different than the other Kashi cereal I had been eating for months… You can’t just add boiling water to the mix because, as the bag warns, the whole grains will not cook. Instead you have to add 2/3 cup of water (I will use less next time as I like my hot cereals to be a near dry cement consistency — a holdover from mornings with my grandmother who preferred it that way herself) and put it in the microwave for 1.5 minutes. The problem with cooking oatmeal this way is that it almost boils over the top and you have to pay very close attention to it to make sure you don’t end up with shit all over the inside of your microwave.

Well, I followed the instructions and sat down to eat my “Truly Vanilla” hot cereal. Bite after bite reminded me that this was not your typical hot cereal loaded with sugar-like solutions, dried fruits and chemicals and instead it was supposed to be healthier. Well, I have been eating plenty of food items that are healthier and they all have some flavor — good or bad. This, true to it’s name, was “truly vanilla” and offered almost no identifiable taste. I really felt like I was eating hot, soft, wet, cardboard. Yuck.

Not one to be a quitter and knowing full well that your first experience with any Kashi product, save for the Honey Almond Flax, can be a bland one and that I should continue to eat it until it’s done. Who knows, maybe it will help me end up like the rest of Minnesota eaters — someone with no verifiable taste buds that enjoy eating at shitty restaurants that pride themselves on horrible service, awful food and then vehemently argue that they are a viable location to return to time and time again.

Or, then again, maybe not :)