A Bellyglad Breakfast

It's a testament to how much I like cereal that when I cheated on the South Beach diet several months ago, it was not for a chocolate croissant or a sticky bun, but a bowl of Trader Joe's Triple Berry O's. These days I eat a bowl of Kashi with fruit and milk or Greek yogurt almost everyday.

So when I discovered the [me] & goji website, which allows you to build your very own unique cereal by dragging and dropping ingredients into a virtual bowl, I was pretty excited. And when I got the chance to make my own concoction for free, I was over the moon. I started with a base of artisanal cereal made with multigrain oat bran flakes, and then added golden granola (containing organic oats, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, honey, vanilla, sea salt, among other things). From the dried fruits category, which included 16 varieties of dried fruit, I chose cherries, coconut, and bright orange goji berries--described as "a Tibetan superfruit from the Himalayas [that] may turn out to be the healthiest food on earth." Who was I to argue?

For nuts, I added pecans, almonds, and amaranth, a grain that was a staple of the Aztec diet and possesses a subtle nutty flavor. As I added ingredients, I could watch their impact on the nutrition information being calculated on the right side of my screen. My goal was high protein (though it is almost impossible to match the 9 grams in Kashi Go Lean) and low calories. The final mixture--called Bellyglad Breakfast (yes, you can name your cereal--how cool is that?)--contained 164 calories and 4.5 grams of protein per serving.

Had I paid for it, the total for all this goodness would have amounted to about $15 plus $5 for shipping & handling. You might feel that $20 is a lot to pay for cereal, and I would have to agree. Still, the cool cylindrical tube you'll receive in the mail (mine came the very next day) contains twice the amount of cereal as your average box from the grocery store. So you're only paying around a dollar a bowl. Plus, your cereal is locally made--in Dover, NH--by three young cereal craftsmen/entrepreneurs whose online photos are rather fetching.

As for the cereal itself, I was quite delighted by the combination of ingredients I'd selected, with only a couple minor complaints: 1) the whole cherries were too big (I would have preferred them in pieces), and 2) all my amaranth settled to the bottom and tasted too overwhelming in the final bowls. But the bottom line is that Bellyglad Breakfast really lived up to the promises [me] & goji makes online. There is only one thing I don't like about this sweet little company, and that is, sadly, its name. It makes me think of a poor translation from Japanese to English (something that might show up on engrish.com) that is further muddled by gratuitous punctuation in the form of brackets and an ampersand.

But those quibbles aside, I urge you to try it. As I said to myself that fateful day several months ago--starved for carbohydrates and craving nothing so much as cereal--Go ahead and have a bowl.