Living in a Cereal World

As I was saying, I had leftover cranberries and needed to do something with them so I figured I'd just throw them in my apple pie. Well, not just. I knew I had a couple of different apple-cranberry pie recipes. All I had to do was find one that called for fresh (not dried) cranberries and wasn't a deep-dish pie so I wouldn't have to go out and buy more apples. As it was, I threw in a sixth apple from the fruit bin just to make sure I had enough. Oh, the recipe?  Festive Apple-Berry Pie . For your festive occasion, a pie that looks festive. Really. Cut a slice and peek inside the rest. It just looks like a holiday pie with the bright red of the cooked cranberries. Mine looked pretty much like the picture although my crimping skills are still a work in progress. And the taste? It would've been a perfectly fine regular apple pie but sometimes you get bored with perfectly fine regular apple pie. It doesn't take much for me to like a pie so I'll just say this one w

I came across this recipe for  Cranberry Poached Pears  in the Thanksgiving issue of Good Housekeeping but as you know, we went away for Thanksgiving so I had to hold on to it 'til last Thursday, when we had Second Thanksgiving. I had my brother in mind since he detests cranberries and cranberry sauce in all forms. But he will put away a pear--and he did. Just picked up his tiny pear and ate the whole thing with his hands. So I was successful on that front. My mom didn't like them for some reason. She can't even give me a good reason, though, so I can't offer any adjustments there. Everyone else ate them, though, and again the next day with leftovers. It really helped to be able to make them in advance since I was so busy last week. All month, when you think about it. Oh, and I didn't need the whole bag of cranberries so I had to do something  with them. Tune in next entry to find out what I did with the cranberries!

We interrupt the holiday recipes (seriously, so many new recipes!) to bring you an actual cereal review. I finally opened the Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch this morning. It looks like they took Cinnamon Toast Crunch but instead of coating it in cinnamon and sugar they ran it through the Frosted Cheerios line. If you're looking for a cereal that tastes like cookies, you'd be better off with Holiday Sprinkles Cookie Crisp. Now that's  like eating a bowl of sugar cookies. I'm not complaining about the Sugar Cookie Toast, though; you know super-sweet cereal does nothing for me anymore. I'm glad it's not as sweet as I feared because goodness knows I've eaten enough actual  sugar cookies this week. My point is that I won't have to worry about wasting this one. I mixed it with honey nut Oatmeal Squares and blueberries, which gave it an almost blueberry muffin-like feel. Hey, did you know blueberries (at least the formerly-frozen kind) turn your milk blue? I did

Oh, look, I found time. I waited for my siblings to be available before I tried this  Pumpkin-Apple Quick Oatmeal . And let me say, it is apple-y. If you're not a big apple fan, you probably won't like cooking your oatmeal (partially) in apple juice. I suppose you could use just water and see what happens. I think the nutmeg is supposed to cut down on the sweetness but I felt like it was actually a little too heavy on the nutmeg. Definitely keep the honey handy. And one more thing, while I did add a dollop of Greek yogurt, it still wasn't creamy enough for me so I added some milk to reach my preferred texture. Okay, one more thing: it only served the three of us. Maybe it was the size of our Xmas bowls? They're nice bowls.

Well, it's that time of year: I get busy, people need to be fed, and I don't make the time to blog. So don't be surprised if this is the only entry this week, even though I'll have several topics by Friday. Last week I wanted a non-red sauced pasta dish, so I thought I'd try this one out on the family:  Garlicky Shrimp Pasta . I've made a similar dish with a Betty Crocker recipe and I think the main difference is the Italian seasoning. It's a lot of Italian seasoning. I didn't even use it all because I was worried it was too much. It mostly stuck to the shrimp, which was a good thing, but for the rest of the dish I hesitated to add all that was left. Needless to say, it did not lack for flavor. But don't leave the Parmesan out at the end; I think it balances everything out.

Saturday was the perfect day for a cookie experiment: my first-ever snickerdoodles.  Pumpkin Spice Snickerdoodles , to be exact. I think I've been holding to on this recipe for a year now. They're just the right size to be a nice little giftable cookie, which was a plus. And I had some pumpkin butter I needed to use up (plus plus). I should point out that mine looked like a traditional puffy snickerdoodle, as opposed to the picture--maybe they were flattened out before baking? And again, my new cookie sheet worked great. If you've never had a snickerdoodle, it's hard to explain the texture. They're not dry like shortbread, or chewy-cakey like you might expect. It's somewhere in between those two. And the spices make for a more interesting flavor than a regular snickerdoodle. More layered, maybe? I can't think of the word I want. Dare I say delicious again? I know I use that word too much. I can't help it when it's the truth, though.

...and there's gonna be cookies. Seriously, the day after the oven was fixed I made my first cookie of the season. Sure,  Oatmeal Scotchies  aren't technically an Xmas cookie, but I had to bake something  oatmeal this month. And I hadn't had these in years, which explains why I was surprised at how much they much spread. At first I thought maybe it was the new cookie sheet (the oldest one got burned up last week) but then I remembered it has to do with the ratio of butter to flour. It didn't adversely affect the flavor, though. Butter + butterscotch chips = come on, now. I even threw in a few raisins because I felt like it, but make sure you use the whole bag of chips like the recipe calls for. Next: well, you'll see. I just finished my second cookie this morning but I'm not ready to write them up yet.

French Toast Crunch  is back.  Why no exclamation point? Because I was never a big fan. I remember being really excited about it the first time around and then disappointed in the actual product. I think the issue was that it didn't taste like my mom's french toast. But why should I have expected that? It wasn't Cerealmom's French Toast Crunch. I think it more closely resembles restaurant-style french toast, which has more of a crispy, almost puffy exterior. And at that point in time, believe it or not, I'd never had french toast in a restaurant (I have since then, at Bob Evans and IHOP). Keeping that in mind, I may have to try a box. Not a priority, though.

Long story short: the oven broke. The oven is broken and there goes the weekly meal plan out the window. Okay, lucky for us, it only affected one day--yesterday. So I started thinking about other proteins and remembered, hey, can't you slice up a pork tenderloin and cook it on top of the stove?  Yes, you can, so we tried this:  Sauteed Pork Medallions with Lemon-Garlic Sauce . It was pretty simple, we already had most of the ingredients (just needed the pork!) and...I can't think of a third thing. The finished meat was sooo tender, though. I just had a sandwich with some of the leftovers. And the good thing about cooking the sauce after  the meat--besides scraping up all the browned bits, of course--was that you weren't forced to eat a lot of lemon juice and garlic if you didn't want to. I'll be combing my recipes for more pork tenderloin recipes now. ******** In other news, Xmas cereals are really a thing this year. There's Christmas Crunch, a Christmas-y Ca

We went away for Thanksgiving this year, so we had to get up early to beat the snow (we didn't. Okay, I  didn't). But I knew I'd have to eat breakfast in the car--thankfully I don't get carsick--so I made my other oatmeal cup right before we left the house. Now, I didn't take notes, so this is mostly going on memory. I couldn't even tell you which berries were in it. Blueberries and some red berry. Maybe I should go look that up. Okay, it's dried cranberries. And that's where the flavor comes from, basically--just the berries. But there are  plenty of berries. And I knew from  last time  that it would stay hot for a good long while. Yes, even in the car. I do like the other flavor better but I'm sure I'll be buying both again.

I went away for Thanksgiving this year, so that necessitated bringing a dish that I could make in advance and  would travel well. Pound cake it is! But not just any pound cake.  Pumpkin Pound Cake . So what's the difference between a pumpkin pound cake and a pumpkin bread? I would say the density, basically. I couldn't eat a thick chunk of cake (although I would've liked to). The canned pumpkin makes it moist, of course, and the spices made the batter smell just like a pumpkin pie. You'll also want to eat more than you actually can. I didn't do the glaze, though, because it probably would've just melted away and/or stuck to the plastic wrap; I'm sure that would take the finished cake from spectacular to awesome--or vice versa.