For me, Lent is a time to refocus and re-prioritize. People traditionally fast from food during Lent, and that was the second part of my fast. (Read about Part 1 here.) I chose to fast from cereal, as that was something I tended to overdo.
Food is a form of self-care. Eating highly palatable foods for comfort is a choice. The problem was that I was mindlessly eating cereal and not finding it fulfilling.
So I took Lent to focus on other food choices. I went back to chocolate bowl cakes (based on this recipe) and peanuts and raisins and hot cocoa. Sometimes they satisfied and I didn't think about cereal, and sometimes they didn't and all I wanted to do was pull down the cereal box and fill my bowl. But I didn't.
I bought special cereal for Easter: chocolate peanut butter Cheerios!
I expected these Cheerios to be amazing, but they weren't. Don't get me wrong, the cereal is decent, but not as rich and satisfying as I'd hoped. (I have something against the way that peanut butter tastes when it bakes. It's a hold over from my dislike of peanut butter for the first 21 years of my life.) My mom likes the Cheerios and I'm mixing them with things, so they'll get eaten, just maybe not as quickly.
I'm a little disappointed that my return to cereal hasn't been as satisfying as I hoped, but that's part of the point of Lent. Food isn't designed to give ultimate satisfaction. It's a good gift from God, but only He ultimately satisfies.
Hereby ends my series of reflections on Lent. Anyone else have Lenten experiences they want to share?
I've eaten a lot of cereal since moving home. I didn't buy cereal very often when I lived on my own, so I guess now I'm making up for it. Like I eat cereal almost every night for a bedtime snack.
As part of my bucket list project, I wanted to try a new cereal. But then I got to thinking that I should make a new cereal. One of my Instagram friends posted about making cereal last week, and so I embarked on the cereal-making journey.
I'd pinned several recipes for homemade cereal after constructing my bucket list, but I decided on this one from Southern Kissed. I didn't have oat bran and I'm not a fan of sugary sweet cereal, so I adapted the recipe and made it my own. Then I shoved my concoction in the oven and waited.
What emerged was a somewhat soft, definitely hardy version of granola. I'm not sure it's like cracklin' oat bran (as per the original recipe) since I left out the bran, but it's definitely good enough to share. I ate the cereal plain for my first bowl, but I mixed it in with other cereals afterwards (as per the first photo). It definitely grew on me, and after a week, it's all gone!
If you want to make a batch of this hearty cereal for yourself, follow the recipe below.
Ingredients:
2 1/2 c rolled oats (divided)
1/2 c dried coconut
1/2 c ground flax seed
1 T cinnamon
1/2 t salt
1/2 t baking powder
1/3 c unsweetened applesauce
2 T maple syrup
2 T olive oil
1 t vanilla
Directions:
1. Place one cup rolled oats in the food processor and grind to a coarse powder.
2. Add the remaining dry ingredients and pulse 5-6 times.
3. Add wet ingredients and process until the liquids has dispersed.
4. Place on a greased pan and bake at 325 degrees for 25 minutes.
5. Allow cereal to cool on the pan. Then break into clumps and store in an air-tight container.
If you try this recipe, please comment below and tell me what you think!
Remember that post I wrote on self-forgiveness? Yeah, I'm having to practice that a lot. I'm having to face my imperfections.
I've always been a perfectionist (like in high school I would rip pages out of my notebook and rewrite them if I made a mistake). I thought I was getting better, caring less about the perfect, and more about the pure, good, and lovely things of life (Phil 4:8). But God's been showing me lately that I still have a long way to go.
Like I've always been a regimented exerciser. I try to follow a pretty strict schedule, and most of the time, it's worked for me. But lately, I've been tired. My body has hurt. So I've been taking time off walking with mom (saving cardio for runs to train for Pat's Run) doing yoga instead of weights, etc. I've felt lazy sometimes, but my body has thanked me by holding up for my runs.
Then there's the whole matter of training for Pat's Run. When I run, I run 3 miles, and a "hard" race is 5K. Now I'm taking on 4.2 miles. It's not that much further...but it is. I was "on schedule" with training, and then suddenly realized I was a week off. And that upset me. It wasn't that I didn't think I could do the next, harder week, but that I'd missed a week. I wanted to follow the schedule.
My eating is still all over the place. Like Tuesday night, there wasn't dinner at Bible study (I thought there would be), so I had a package of Nature's Valley peanut butter chocolate granola cups to tide me over. When I got home, I had a bowl of chocolate applesauce almond butter oatmeal (based off this recipe) and a TON of cereal. And I felt kind of sick afterwards, but I was so hungry.
And then there's chores around the house. I usually help my mom clean the bathroom on Wednesdays, and this Wednesday, I totally forgot, which meant she did it all. She was gracious with me, but I felt terrible!
So yeah, I'm pretty much imperfect. I don't have my life together. I fail at lots of things. And I'm human. A human in need of a perfect Savior. A perfect Savior who paid the perfect price for all my sins so that I can forgive myself...and others...for being imperfect.
