Living in a Cereal World

Also, happy blogiversary! Yes, I'm still here after five years. I can't help it; they keep inventing new cereals. Anyway, Lent is really late this year, so I've had plenty of time to prepare. In previous years I've given up: white flour and sugar, and discovered other grains and sweeteners; flavored yogurt, and learned how to flavor my own with different fruits (and I still eat all the recipes I tried that year!); processed/packaged sides, and learned to make my own. So there's basically only one difficult thing left to give up. No, not blogging. I get antsy if I miss a week. Nope, I mean... Cereal. I know, I know, that's the purpose of this blog, what am I going to do for six weeks? Like I said, I've had plenty of time to prepare. I have enough recipes to try--at least I hope so. I'm not one of those people who can eat the same thing for breakfast every day. I read other blogs where people have smoothies every day or eat oatmeal every day. Th...

(Yeah, I'm running out of scone puns.) Also, it's hot. I'm wearing short sleeves in February. February. That is not normal. Good thing I wasn't planning on making soup this week. But yeah, the scones. I mentioned last month  that I would be making these Banana Nut Scones . So I did, earlier this month: I liked that this recipe only made eight, so I didn't end up with a freezer full of scones. And maybe you can tell that I didn't use nuts (if you're a regular reader of this blog I'm assuming you made that assumption) but there's still plenty of good points to these scones. And I don't mean the triangular shape. What I want to highlight is the maple glaze. It's a really nice complement to the banana and I think plays down the ginger somewhat. In fact, after I made this glaze I basically went on a maple kick all month. I'm hoping to move on to something else for March.

The month's almost over and I haven't written the one blog post I intended to this month: Behold the pear cake. Actually, if you behold it really closely you can see the two things I would've done differently: 1) cut the pear chunks smaller; and 2) use more pear. Regardless of the measurements, just go ahead and use two shredded and two diced pears. Almost forgot, here's the recipe: Fresh Pear Bundt Cake . I'd never heard of Taste of the South magazine but (totally by coincidence) I saw it at a grocery store checkout last week. My mother requested a Bundt cake for her birthday--"something I can eat with vanilla ice cream"--as long as there was no chocolate involved because she's not really supposed to be eating chocolate. Okay, then. So I thought, what fruits haven't I worked with lately? Two years ago I made her a Pear Streusel Cake , surely there must be a pear Bundt cake out there. Of course, Google finds everything. Obviously I d...

You may recall that I was disappointed last year to find that Special K Nourish cereal had those little soy twigs that I'm allergic to, but here I am giving their new granola a chance. It doesn't have those twigs but it does have a lot of puffed rice. I only sampled a little bit of it but from that sample I honestly thought it was only puffed rice. And that's not really granola to me. Actually, oats are the first ingredient but somehow I overlooked that. Perhaps I was concentrating on the freeze-dried berries. That's the best feature of this granola: three different berries and plenty of them. The freeze- dried cranberries even retained their tart flavor. Overall, it wasn't what I was expecting but it wasn't bad.

This is what I do on a snow day: I bake a pie. Then I eat said pie. Now if I had kids we'd probably make cookies, but since I'm only feeding adults, we get pie. I had a pie crust that was about to expire and some cranberries in the freezer that I wanted to finish, so that's how we get Apple Cranberry Crumb Pie . It's still a good month for apples, right? Eh, it's always a good month for apples. Cranberries, on the other hand, are just Fall and Winter for me. You can see from the picture that there was only a teensy bit of leakage (raise your hand if you've ever had a watery pie🙋) so that was a relief. I had just enough flour for the filling and crumble topping. And you can't tell from this angle but this pie is loaded with apples. Layer upon layer of apples. Those are the best pies.

I wasn't sure if I should review this one just after opening--you know how all the fruit ends up at the bottom of the box. But then I figured I'd give you my first impressions anyway. First of all, interesting fruit flavor combination there. As usual, I forgot that Raisin Bran Crunch will still have raisins in it no matter what. But someone decided, you know what this needs? More fruit. So the inside of the bag smelled like a strawberry Nutri-Grain bar, which meant that had to be a strong strawberry scent to pierce the memories of a product I haven't had in a decade. That's a good sign. Poured into the bowl? Oh, right, there's the raisins. And one little speck of...freeze-dried strawberry? That's it? Well, that was it for that day. As for flavor, it did manage to taste distinctly of strawberry and apple. Maybe the next bowl will reveal more answers to my fruit questions.

Or: how not to feel guilty about French toast. Not that one should feel guilty about French toast per se, but brioche as my French toast? Once or twice a year. That's it. That stuff is rich. Also? Not feeling guilty about birthday treats. That's my policy, regardless of whose birthday it is. They're birthday treats, and then you go back to your regular meals. Okay, enough analysis. My mom is not a big French toast-eater, but if it involves brioche and fruit? She'll be there. So I decided to try this Peach and Berry French toast  that was in People magazine a few weeks ago. I have a peach-blueberry pie that my mom loves, so why not try those flavors for breakfast? I worried about my frozen peaches cooking all the way through but they turned out fine. And hot! Seriously, watch those peach slices. They may have also made the bottom slices of bread a bit soggier than fresh peaches but that wasn't a dealbreaker. Did I mention this was my first time making baked Fr...