You won’t eat hot cereal? Fine.

I’ll just have to make bread instead.

On these FREEZING cold mornings, cold cereal doesn’t cut it. Although cereals are so fast and convenient, sometimes I have the overwhelming urge to send them off to school with something warm in their belly — something full of whole grains.  It’s really not too hard to make the time-consuming steel cut oats, as mixing everything the night before cuts down the cook and serve time down by three fourths.

Figuring out just how much cereal to make is always tough; the serving sizes on the packages never quite match up to our bowls. Too much, and you have leftovers; too little, and someone will be left hungry. No matter what, there’s always one who just doesn’t feel like eating what I’ve made, and I’m left with a pan of leftover warm cereal.

Leftover hot cereals are difficult to save to re-present as fresh cereals the next day. No one wants it. A new mornings ago,  I had a pan of leftover cream of rice. Inspired by Stephanie, I wanted to find a way to use the leftover cereal to make something else, like Stephanie’s scones.

By the time I got around to baking, I didn’t have access to the computer to find Stephanie’s recipe, so I just opened my Betty Crocker cookbook, and followed the ingredients for Banana Bread. The recipe called for 4 1/3 cups of flour — so I used cooked cream of rice as some of the flour. I ended up with 2 cups of flour, and 1/1/3 cups of cream of rice.

Quick bread recipes are really quite forgiving.  Since then, I’ve branched out, left the cookbook on the shelf, and now I just mix in the left-over hot cereal into any quick bread recipe, without even measuring. Yesterday I used leftover oatmeal to make blueberry grunt.

Some mornings, I scoop the cereal into a baggie and freeze is to save for the next time I’m whipping up a batter. Now leftover cereal is the afternoon snack — even for the pickiest eater at my table.