Seriously, Your New Guilty Pleasure Is … Weetabix?

Most nights, after both kiddos are asleep, my sweet tooth and I go foraging. I can easily go through half a pan of brownies, a row (or more) of Oreos, even those two-minute microwave mug cakes that were basically created by the Internet.

Last night’s guilty treat was new—and superlative—but kind of confusing. Because I’m not entirely convinced it was all that guilty: A coupla oval pucks of Weetabix in a bowl, with rich, hot Nutella cocoa poured over it. Marshmallows optional.

When I set up to do a blog post on fun ways to mix it up with Weetabix, I was pretty pepped to try some WAY OUT THERE things:

• Scrunch it up with melted butter (But no added sugar — even my sweeth tooth is a snob about too-sweet crusts) to make a wholesome but yummy tart crust. And then you gleefully fill it with ganache or maple whip or cheesecake or whatever decadence you like, BECAUSE LOOK HOW HEALTHFUL MY WHOLE-GRAIN, FIBRE-RICH CRUST IS!
• Or maybe use it instead of panko crumbs on broiled fish or a mac-n-cheese gratin. With one solitary gram of sugar in every oval, it would wear rosemary or parmesan like a champ.
• Or just mix crumbled Bix with peanut butter, honey, mini chocolate chips, and ground flax seed. Smush into spheres and called them energy balls.

. . . And those were all without even checking Pinterest.

I am willing to bet money every single one of those ideas would work brilliantly (That will be $5, please). Weetabix tastes good but not overpowering, and its texture is frankly perfect for these ideas.

But then I realized two things:

1. It’s kind of like trying to record Aretha Franklin doing a Rihanna set. Sure, she would probably blow the doors down—quality is quality. But why not just savour the goodness in its natural habitat? The whole POINT of Weetabix is that not only is it good for you, it tastes good—I was frankly surprised by how good—and you can have a lot of fun with it without any genre-bending whatsoever.

2. Even more importantly, every puck stolen from my children’s future cereal bowls is a puck I get heck for.

Since the Bix came through our door, both Toddler and Kindergartner have been eating it like its their life’s work. I know you think I wrote that because this is a sponsored post, but the fact is, this stuff has some kind of magical kid-enticement baked right into it. The only other time they've been this excited about fibre, it was on a muppet.

They like it, plain and simple. It's good.

In the last 5 days, one or both of these girls has

• Eaten Bix with milk and frozen blueberries, the kind that turn everything and everyone purple.
• Mixed the Bix into warm milk with cinnamon and honey
• Picked up a Bix and just plain eaten it like a fibre-rich oval candy bar, rather than something that is actually, you know, GOOD for young, growing minds and bodies.
• Crunched it up into a bowl of yogurt and granola.
• Rolled slippery pieces of mango and banana in the pulverized Bix crumbs on a high chair tray, then declared the treat crunchy before hoovering it and demanding more.
• Asked—and I swear this is the gospel truth—to eat unsweetened Weetabix in milk for dessert. As a dessert nut and a card-carrying glutton, I watched in fascinated horror, but my dessert-hating daughter not only ate it, she asked for it again the next day.

I still intend to try to Bix-encrusted fish thing, and the Bix balls. But for now, I’m enjoying watching two very different children accessorize the exact same food in their very different ways, day after day. They're not yet tired of it. They're still finding fun things to do with it.

And another mundane but delightful plus: It is so easy to gauge how much a kid has eaten when it’s measured in simple ovals. And if you are watching your serving sizes, welcome to portion control central. Every puck — they’re actually called biscuits— has one lonely gram of sugar. Unless you, too, run amok with chocolate and 'shmallows.

But hey, how you mix it up is your Bixness. Just maybe do it after bedtime.

Sonia Verma delights in food that tastes good enough to hide the fact that it's actually good for you. Or maybe that's WHY it tastes good?