Not All Cereals are Created Equal

I have fond memories of eating bowls and bowls of sugary cereal as a kid.  My mom would always buy us healthy cereals most of the time.  However, on our birthday we would get to pick a birthday cereal.  This is when I would enjoy the wonders of Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms, Honey Combs and Cinnamon Toast Crunch.  There is something special about Cinnamon Toast Crunch.  It leaves your milk so absolutely cinnamon-sugary wonderful that drinking the milk from the bowl is just about as good as eating the cereal!  Anyway, with food prices going up, up and away I have been trying to buy more store brands.  Ben and I were at HEB a few weeks ago and I picked up a box of the generic brand Cinnamon Toast Crunch called Cinni-Mini Crunch.  As I place the box in the cart, Ben says “No, you can’t buy that.  It doesn’t taste the same.”  With a sigh and an eye roll I get the regular and more expensive Cinnamon Toast Crunch.  I’m at HEB a few days ago and I decide that I’m going to buy the Cinni-Mini Crunch despite Ben’s warning.  I ate a bowl of it yesterday morning and…Ben was right!  It looked the same and smelled the same, but upon the first square of cereal entering my mouth I could tell that it was not the General Mills cereal known as Curiously Cinnamon in the UK.  So, my husband was right and generic CTC is just not as tasty as the real thing.  Lesson learned.