It took a few years of trial and error for me to come up with a daily breakfast that was a keeper, easy to prepare, and healthy. Oatmeal.
![[mountain high yogurt]](yogurt.gif)
Briefly, it's a half cup old-fashioned rolled oats cooked in a pan with one cup of soy milk [at some point in the past I outgrew my taste for milk, whole, skim, or whatever and found soy milk the reasonable alternative. I won't even consider making oatmeal with plain water, though that's another option.].
My bowl of oatmeal gets two add-ons. For a bit of mild fruity sweetness [with a relatively low glycemic index], I add frozen blackberries. For a creamy, dairy topping, I add whole milk yogurt. The brand of yogurt I've been using for several years is Straus whole milk, European-style that is sold at Whole Foods. Straus yogurt differs from other yogurt styles in being nearly "pourable' in its consistency.
I decided Straus tastes great in part because it reminds me of the yogurt I had on the Eurostar crossing the Chunnel on the way to Paris from London. Taste memories are long-lived.
But for me there was a nagging problem with Straus yogurt. I felt at $5 a quart it was overpriced, considering it was yogurt. Here I was spending more on Straus yogurt for each breakfast than I was on the rest of the ingredients! I thought the price-goudging tendencies of Whole Foods might be at play. Until, I looked around to see who else sells Straus Whole Milk yogurt.
It turns out, compared to the competition, Whole Foods has the lowest price. New Seasons, a local chain that has pretensions of imitating Whole Foods, charges $2 more!
Seeing no alternative to paying for over-priced Straus, I decided to evaluate other choices.
I knew any close replacement for Straus had to be whole milk [more flavorful than low-fat varieties, in my opinion]. My search led me to Mountain High Whole Milk Yoghurt. It costs about 45% less than Straus, and surprisingly is made from the same real California milk in Northern California as Straus.
No, it's not a perfect substitute, but I've grown to like it's real yogurt flavor ["No gelatin or funny stuff"] and the consistency has grown on me. A bit firmer and how traditional yogurt sets up.
I've always been wary of overspending on anything you consume regularly, and my yogurt-topped oatmeal--a six times weekly proposition—needed value review. Maybe it's a sense of budgetary aesthetics, but I can say I enjoy my breakfast much more, now that I'm spending half the money for great-tasting whole milk yogurt!
Image credit: google images: mountainhighyoghurt.com
Read Charlie Dickinson's
story collection, The Cat
at Light's End, as an ebook in these downloadable
formats:
.mobi
(Kindle)
.epub (most other readers)
.pdf (for PCs)
Also, a flash fiction, "Ylena Thinks Nyet," is at Cigale Literary Magazine.
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