Your Cereal Stinks

I had a hard day today.  I had driven approximately 15 hours to and from work fighting a freak snowstorm, idiotic Washington, D.C. drivers, horrible music on the radio, a dead iPad and severe lack of sweet tea.  I finally got home to a warm, comfortable, loving environment and needed to eat something.  I went straight to my go-to for quick comfort food – cereal.

The choices were approximately endless:

Corn Flakes (stressful because the shape of the cereal causes the milk to launch out all willy-nilly while pouring)
Honey Smacks (not always a great choice – because it makes certain biological outputs smell like, well, Honey Smacks)
Raisin Bran (not bad – but it has LOTS of bran (hence the name)….enough said)
Frosted Mini-Wheat (innocuous, but I had them the previous day)
Cheerios (supposedly good for you, supposedly helps your cholesterol)

So my obvious choice was Cheerios to supposedly be healthy.  I poured my bowl of Cheerios, dumped a cup of sugar on them (also good for cholesterol), and poured the milk in with nary a dairy launching.  All is good, right?  I’m enjoying the moment of quiet and peacefulness that only a good bowl of cereal can cure – and my wife walks into the kitchen with the following comforting phrase:

“Your cereal stinks….”

Hmmm.  What do I do with that information?  Don’t get me wrong, I tend to agree with her because I remember sitting in church as a kid (ok, last month) when a mother in the pew behind me gave her sniveling, crying little child a bag of dry Cheerios for comfort and quiet.  It worked.  But the smell it produced was just this side of the chemical plants in Terre Haute, Indiana that I used to pass on the interstate growing up.

But still…couldn’t she have been just a LITTLE more considerate?  This coming from the same woman who a few months ago – after I got home after having gone through another long, hard day at work greeted my simple request for information about what was for dinner with the now-infamous line that still chills me to my bone:

“Pork butt and cauliflower”

And then she gets MAD at me for my facial reaction.  How can those four words put together IN ANY ORDER not cause you to have some sort of negative facial reaction?

Anyway, it got me to thinking about the worst smelling food that I can imagine.  It’s going to come as a surprise that I have one WAY at the top of my list.  That single food, the one that I like to eat but produces the most horrendous smell in the world is:

Yogurt.  Specifically, empty yogurt containers.

There is not a more evil aroma in the world than a used container of yogurt.  It permeates the very core of my nostrils and stimulates every nauseating nerve in my throat .  If anyone throws an empty container of yogurt away in my immediate vicinity, as soon as they are out of eyesight I run and take that cup and treat it like the atomic waste that it is.  I’ve fished empty yogurt cups out of the trash at work and taken out trash in rainstorms at home all for the sake of keeping that smell at arm’s length.  Call me obsessed.  Call me odd.  Call me what you will.  But that smell trumps any Cheerios’ eatin’ I’ve ever done.

So what foods are you stuck with that cause an absolute meltdown in the aroma arena?  That make you want to leap out of your seats and run screaming down the hallway?

Oh.  The pork butt and cauliflower?  Somehow, someway….it was delicious.  I have never tasted ass so tender.