♣

It has peppermint-flavored dark chocolate. And it’s caffeinated!

♣

Where the hell you going to find peppermint-flavored dark chocolate? Hell, I don’t know. We made our own, in the course of making homemade Thin Mints, yo. So, I guess the first step in making this cereal is to bake some cookies. After making the cookies, you may think, “Screw the oatmeal, I’m having cookies for breakfast.” Then you’ll think, “These cookies are minty. Do I still have to brush my teeth.” Uh, yeah you do.

We wanted to call our new cereal “mochameal,” but it seems that’s some kind of a shake that is “not a diet, it’s a lifestyle.” We didn’t want to have to wade into the issue of whether those who partake in diet shakes do so by choice or by design (even though we do suspect that diet shake drinkers were born that way), so we moved on. We thought “moatmeal.” But Alice Carrier – tattoo artist at Wonderland Tattoo in beautiful Portland, born left handed on the winter solstice, descended from Salem witches – already wasted that that term on a lovely-but-ordinary bowl of oatmeal. We cannot have our revolutionary breakthrough in vegan breakfast technology associated with something sinister (by which we mean cereal prepared by a southpaw).

We discovered 1,430,000 results in a search for “peppermint mocha oatmeal.” What do you have to do to come up with something original? Create a $400 White Castle Slider with white Italian truffles, a couple ounces of prosciutto, some duck foie gras, Russian caviar, a fried quail egg, 24K gold flakes, and some port wine pate bullshit thing that you picked up on the way home from work? Determined to triumph over the internet, we searched for vegan peppermint mocha oatmeal, but the internet took only milliseconds to slap us in the face with 1,580,000 vegan peppermint oatmeal entries, the first of which was authored by a drama queen.

We see now that we’re in over our heads on this one.

Or so we thought. Until we noticed that the drama queen oatmeal contains zucchini: no thank you. The rest of the search engine results were cookies, candy, and pumpkin pie. Yes, pumpkin pie. Stupid internet. So with that, we give you Vegan Peppermint Mocha Oatmeal.

Makes 1 serving

½ cup oatmeal
¾ oz. pepperminty dark chocolate
1 Tbs sugar, more or less, to taste
1¼ cup black coffee

Place the oatmeal, chocolate, sugar, and 1 cup of the coffee in a microwavable cereal bowl. Nuke according to oatmeal package directions. Pour remaining coffee over oatmeal and stir.

You could make-do with regular dark chocolate and a tiny droplet of peppermint oil. Oh, but the sugar has to come from sugar beets. I can’t remember why … it’s something about Madonna and some “stinky town” in Michigan. I’m not sure. But Jane Pauly also has something to do with it.

Peppermint Mocha Oatmeal: Another vegan breakfast that I can more-or-less get behind

Credits for all images on this page: Make It Like a Man; hover over them for more information. Hovering over green text will produce tantalizing pop-ups. Click for pure joy.