Granola crisis

I eat the same thing every morning — the generic version of Grape Nuts (Hannaford calls them “Nutty Nuggets”), a little granola, raisins or cranberries, and some wheat germ. Enough milk to make it moist, not wet. I’m not OCD about it, but it has to be just so. I don’t like anything very sweet for breakfast — a reaction to a permissive childhood, tooth-rotting-cereal-wise — and it’s always been a challenge to find a granola that isn’t so sweet it makes my gums bleed. A couple of years ago I found Chappaqua Crunch in the organic aisle, and it was just perfect. Right taste, right texture, and the little dried raspberries added great flavor (nothing like the dried raspberries the astronauts ate!). Then last summer it disappeared. Panicky sampling ensued — think of it as cereal primaries — but no winner emerged. Not even a front-runner, for that matter.
I was even almost ready to start making my own granola, something I desperately don’t want to do because I lived through the ’70s, I learned long ago that I’m not a hippie, and I was just beginning to forget the embarrassment of earth shoes. But all the boxed granolas are either crazy expensive, crazy sweet, or both. So now I’m rooting through the bulk bins — the very kind of food handling that modern hygiene laws were meant to prevent — thinking there’s only a very thin chance that any of the last 200 people who rooted through the granola bin had some flesh-eating virus or dripping lesions, and wishing there were a convenient radioactive sanitizing device for the communal scoop.

But here I am, putting it in my body. It doesn’t suck, but it’s still not what I’m looking for. Looks like I’m going to have to resort to internet groceries. (Note to self — while at it, load up on Altoids Gingers, the One True Candy.)