Living in a Cereal World

Because I have been asked this before, no, it's not about the calories, I just wanted to try the flavor. This is probably only the second time I've had a box of these Honey Squares, so I'm trying to remember how I felt about them the first time. I wasn't blown away but I wasn't displeased, either. I'm pretty sure I was willing to give them a second chance. On to the cereal: they look like little Golden Grahams, but they don't taste like it, and the texture is different. Not only because it has that gritty--and flashback-inducing --feel of corn cereals, but it seems to be puffed with more air than the flatter Grahams. The taste is just sweet enough; I'm beginning to wonder if I shouldn't type honey as "honey" instead so you know exactly what I mean. Most of these honey cereals have a subtle sweetness to them. Code word: honey. You know, when you type the word "honey" over and over again it starts to look weird. There's actu...

(from 16Feb'12) A few years back I was devastated  (relatively--I know it's just a breakfast food) when they stopped making Honey Graham Life. That was the Best. Cereal. Ever. But then they replaced it with Maple Brown Sugar Life and all was forgiven. I never did like regular Life. As a kid I thought it was the weirdest flavor. Cinnamon Life is just okay. I use it for mixing but I wouldn't eat a bowl of it on its own. *** back to today, new product alert: Apple Cinnamon Chex. I probably won't get to that for a few weeks, though. Also, if you haven't the new Mini-Wheats Fruit in the Middle Raspberry flavor because you don't live near a Target, good news! I spotted it at Giant yesterday. I suppose that means it's being rolled out to all regular supermarkets now.

Tuesday has been my busy day lately, so I only have a few little things today: --In my last entry, I mentioned how much I disliked the Total box. Well, it's been cleaned up a little. Just slap a nice picture of a bowl of your product on the front and I'll be happy. --I think, if I'm not mistaken, Quaker has started putting Stila bars in a regular rectangular box. What, nobody likes parallelograms? --I finally caught my white whale over the weekend: pear butter! Totally worth the wait. I'll have to add it to the fruit butter write-up I haven't typed yet. --I haven't gotten around to sharing the cake I made for Father's Day: a sweet potato bundt cake. My brother loved it especially. He said it was his new favorite. I could do without the pecans in the streusel (I'm sure I've gone on the record with regards to nuts in my baked goods) and I may have baked it a little too long but it was tasty. And dense. But not pound cake dense. To sum up, quot...

Why review a cereal that's been discontinued? I guess I just wanted it on the record. I was actually looking for Total Cranberry Crunch--I didn't realize that was already gone. Really disappointing. I'll wait till the end of the year, though, for any new flavors of Total before I resort to buying the regular kind and putting Craisins in it. Anyway, obviously I haven't bought Total in a while. Let's start with the redesigned box. Who is the target audience here? Accountants? Engineers? It's too busy and makes eating a healthier cereal seem sooooo serious. You only need to appeal to me with good flavors. As for the actual cereal, I like that's there two different kinds of flakes--oat and wheat, I think--although I'm still not sure which is which. The darker one is probably wheat. Also, there's flax seed clusters. I never noticed that was where the flax came in. I wonder if chia seed clusters are next? That would be an interesting sell. So this...

My brother came home to visit last week so it was the perfect time to try out some new recipes. First, Roasted Garlic Chicken Sausage and Summer Vegetable Saute. This was the first time I'd ever tried the Al Fresco brand of chicken sausage and Classico Pasta Sauce (I have to watch my tomato sauces; some brands are too rich for me). The combination of the two worked out just fine. I actually cut the recipe in half--we only needed to feed four--and heated the sausage in a pan instead of grilling. It probably would have been better with that flavor you can only get from a grill but I'm not complaining. Second, Asparagus-Stuffed Chicken Rolls. Who doesn't like stuffing foods with other foods? This is a two-person recipe, so to stretch it out to four I used two really big chicken breasts and split them down the middle. Also, I forgot about the sage leaves so I just added some dried sage to the breadcrumb mixture. This was really good but I might have used a little too much...

I wasn't going to try this, but it was on sale for $1.99, so I figured, okay, for that I'll be your guinea pig. My first impression upon looking at the box (and tasting it) was that this must be Quaker's answer to Honey Nut Cheerios. It makes sense; they are the oat company. The shape is intended to be a heart--it's more defined on the inside than out. The texture is close to Cheerios but maybe puffed with a bit more air. It's such a slight difference you might not even notice. When soggy, the chewiness reminds me of another cereal I used to eat but I can't think of it; it's driving me crazy. Alpha-Bits, maybe? And some of the corn/oat Cheerios. The sweet flavor is similar to Corn Pops, which, coincidentally, was the other half of my cereal mix today (my brother was home last week and ate all my Oatmeal Squares--I expected that, though). You can really tell that a little something extra is missing since there's no nut flavor as well. If forced to ...

Another classic. If I was forced to choose only one cereal to eat with bananas, it would be this one. Bananas and honey just belong together. What can I say about such a well-known product? First, thank you , General Mills, for not messing with this one. You can invent forty more flavors of Cheerios as long as you leave this one alone. The size and texture of the oats should stay the same; the honey nut flavor doesn't need to be any sweeter or nuttier or more intense. And don't ever get rid of the Bee. (Technically I was finishing up the Kix but I needed something to complete the bowl. The Honey Nut Cheerios dominated the flavors but that was fine.)

I don't bake often but my brother is home for the week and dominoes (no food pun intended) just kept falling. I was determined to make this blueberry rhubarb pie because my brother loves blueberries and he'd recommended strawberry rhubarb pie to me a few years ago. Now I'd never had rhubarb until this pie, but I guess if it can be baked, I'll try it. First, I had to find some rhubarb. I actually had to go two towns over to Wegmans, where it turned it out to be cheaper to buy frozen rhubarb for the amount I needed. Once it thawed, I was able to really assess it for the first time. It reminded me of celery, but not as stringy (and don't worry, it doesn't taste like it either). Another first time ingredient for me: tapioca. It's a thickener and I think I love it. Nobody likes runny, watery fillings, especially when using frozen fruit. Tapioca tightens that right up. It was nice to cut a slice and have nothing but fruit and crust. As for the flavor, it wa...

(from 15Feb'12) Apparently this replaces Raisin Bran Extra, which is not a problem for me, because I wasn't too fond of it anyway. This new Cinnamon Almond, though? Delicious. My one complaint is the lack of raisins. I hope they're all in the bottom of the box. Otherwise, where's my two scoops of raisins, Kellogg's? *** update: I just opened a fresh box of this on Monday. I think there's more raisins this time. Maybe they figured out the ratio.

I just happened by accident to come across how to make use of those top tabs. They were one of the reasons I chose this layout in the first place. So now with the labels you can choose what you want to read and skip the rest. I have a feeling most people are here for the cereal reviews anyway... Enjoy!

(from 14Feb'12--I forgot I still have catching up to do!) Today was a repeat cereal day, so I thought I'd review a granola. I eat it with yogurt a few times a week. I bought this Archer Farms Cranberry Crisp cereal thinking it was granola and didn't realize my mistake until I got home. The MacGyver-y (okay, not really) solution: I mixed it with some Cascadian Farms french vanilla granola I already had on hand. Pretty good, even with the weird wheat twigs. Like eating Golden Crisp without the guilt.

I wanted to make a simple pound cake for Memorial Day and had this one in my back pocket since last November. Well, I committed quite possibly the biggest baking error there is: I forgot the sugar. There were at least three points in the baking process where I should've caught that mistake but I missed every one. I know I was too focused on not screwing up melting the chocolate--it was my first time--but that's not really an excuse. It just wasn't a good day to bake. I had too many other things on my mind. So then I had a whole bunch of leftover milk chocolate morsels. What to do? Cookies, duh. I considered making regular chocolate chip cookies but then I came across this oatmeal cookie recipe specifically for milk chocolate chips. Anytime I can stick oats in my baked goods, it's done. As for the cookies, they're not bad. A little too buttery-rich for me; I can't really eat more than one at a time. That's probably a good thing anyway. ****** Just a qu...

This is the most recent flavor in the Fiber Plus cereal line. I've realized that "crunch" is Kellogg's shorthand for "contains oat clusters." But it works on two levels for me because this is another one of those cereals with crunchy flakes that hold up for a long time. Seriously, I was still picking out a few non-soggy flakes at the end. I'm sure I've mentioned before that I don't like nuts in my cereal but there's so little pecan in the clusters that it's not really an issue. My focus returns to the flakes. The caramel flavor is strong in this box. It almost reminds me of...Cracker Jack, maybe? It would be too much for me without the addition of the oat/pecan clusters. Also, the box boasts of tasting better than Fiber One Honey Clusters, but I beg to differ. It tastes stronger , yes. But it tastes different because they're entirely different flavors. The Fiber One in question has a mild honey flavor. You can't really compare t...