Breakfast of weirdness

Here's an attempt at a boring slice of life:

My mother, 90 and in full possession of all her faculties, imagines (and if she reads this I hope she understands that I am reaching for a rhetorical point her, forget the facts) that she cannot tolerate gluten. This has something to do with mysterious rashes that seem to inflame when she eats wheat. Oats, a staple in her diet for decades, are out, too.

So she tries a few gluten-free products. One of them makes her itch the more. She decides it's because it has corn in it. So she gives it to me. I already have the pasta, flour and oatmeal she cleaned out of her cupboard.

This product is gluten-free breakfast cereal, the kind you have to cook. (We always cook from scratch in our family.) It contains ground-up corn, brown rice, buckwheat and "sweet white sorphum." Yum. Not. Maybe. Why not try it?

I make some. It cooks up like cornmeal mush, thick and inclined to stick to the pan. As it cooks, I notice there are cute little red ink marks on the cellophane of the package where Mom tried to note the proportions of cereal and water she used, but they are mostly worn off and illegible.

I make myself a mocha and wait for the cereal to cook. I put away the clean dishes. I stir it. It sticks. It bubbles in a farty way. I have time to wait for it to cook because I don't have to go to work till 3 p.m.

Are you still with me? You're nuts. This doesn't get any more exciting.

The final result is so thick that I have to boil a bit of water in the kettle to thin it out (I don't want to serve it with milk, that's in the mocha, along with the espresso and chocolate sauce -- homemade, of course). I serve it with a little butter and some maple syrup. It's really rather nice, like cornmeal but lighter and less cloying. I like brown rice, anyway, in any form.

I sit down with my bowl of cereal and my nice mocha and start reading the New York Times. A story about the teacher who was the basis for the Broadway play "Doubt" unexpectedly moves me to tears. While I am blowing my nose, I think -- today is the day I am finally going to blog. And this is the result.