Living in a Cereal World

This should've been my first post of the year. Of course this is what you're really here to read. Let's start with what I've already seen in stores: Special K Nourish -- you know the hot cereal, now here's a cold offering. Available in Apple Raspberry Almond and Coconut Cranberry Almond. I will be trying both. Nature Valley -- they've already branched out to granola and muesli; it was only a matter of time before they added cereal. Two flake cereals, Honey Oat Clusters and Chocolate Oat Clusters, and Baked Oat Bites, which is some kind of oat squares. I will also be sampling all of these. Cascadian Farm has new FarmStand Harvest granolas. I've only seen the vanilla coconut & pumpkin seed flavor so far but there's three others. I believe I read that the Cranberry Maple Wild Rice is only available at Kroger so I guess I'll be making an extra stop the next time I visit my grandma. There's also two new Mini-Wheats flavors (that I haven...

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.

It seems chocolate is going to be the hot trend for the start of 2014: they're sticking it in Multigrain Cheerios, Honey Bunches of Oats, and as my eagle eye actually spotted today, Chocolate Toast Crunch. Yaaaay, says everybody except me. I don't know, I suppose I could try one.  There's a new Fiber One, too, but I was in a rush today and the grocery store was crowded. I need to get back to my routine in the new year.

I've been meaning to mention this for weeks but just couldn't pick a post to tack this on the end: the return of the monster cereals. By now you probably know that Count Chocula, Boo Berry, and Franken Berry are Halloween-seasonal (stock up now!) but this year General Mills brought back  Frute Brute and Yummy Mummy . I can see why they were discontinued in the first place--do you really need four  fruity marshmallow cereals? Frute Brute was not before my time but before my functional memory; however, I vaguely remember Yummy Mummy. Either I wasn't interested in it back then or it was on the "Absolutely Not So Don't Even Ask" list; either way, I never tried it. If you  want to try one in a retro-style package, though, they're now available at Target. I just saw them over the weekend.

General Mills has a new website:  Hello, Cereal Lovers . Hello, yourself, cereal maker. I had to check it out. They have recipes and fun stuff you can do with cereal and their boxes. I took the quiz and got the result of "Cereal Genius." I feel like I should put that on a business card like Wile E. Coyote.

So...glass fragments in Special K > wire in Mini-Wheats? Ok, I know, it's really not something to joke about. Here's the specifics. Go check your Red Berries right now. At least Kellogg's is on top of things.

A few more to mention: from the makers of Honey Bunches of Oats Fruit Blends comes Honey Bunches of Oats Tropical Blends Mango Coconut. With mango flakes, coconut-flavored clusters and coconut shavings. This one is high on my list. There's also a new Greek Honey Crunch that sounds interesting. While out yesterday and today I spotted a few of these new cereals in stores, including Honey Nut Cheerios Medley, Peanut Butter Toast Crunch, and Special K Chocolatey Strawberry. And one not yet on the Kellogg's website: Cinnamon Jacks. Say what now? I thought Apple Jacks already had a cinnamon flavor. I got over Apple Jacks a long time ago but I am begrudgingly adding this new one to the list as well. You know I love my cinnamon.

So I thought I'd sniff around today to find any new products I might be interested in trying this year. Boy, are there. Let's start with General Mills. First, Honey Nut Cheerios Medley Crunch: a combination of Cheerios, wheat flakes, and "clusters", which I hope have some oats involved. It sounds like a lot for one cereal but I'll have to see how the different elements come together. It sounds like something my dad (the original cereal mixer of the family) will love. Second, Peanut Butter Toast Crunch. You had me at "Peanut Butter." Probably only once. As for the Fiber One 80 calorie chocolate cereal, I might have to strongly hint to my brother to help me out with that one. Kellogg's has two cereals, too: Frosted Mini-Wheats Crunch brown sugar cereal, which looks from the box to be their answer to Quaker's Oatmeal Squares, but that's just a guess; and a limited-edition Special K Chocolatey Strawberry cereal. Didn't I already tell...

My sister came home (again) with a new pumpkin butter to try, this one by Meridian Marketplace (there was no actual website but I did find it in a fundraising catalog). It's on the darker side of the color range, like Dickinson's, but with its own distinct flavor--a bit heavy on the cloves. It tastes like what I expect Celestial Seasonings' new Harvest Pumpkin tea to taste like: slightly overseasoned, to get that recognizable flavor. It's not my favorite but I like it and I would totally try their strawberry-rhubarb preserves, too. In other news, in case you missed it: there's been a recall of Nesquik chocolate powder. Man, that takes me back. Not to product recalls or Salmonella outbreaks, but to my milk-drinking days. My favorite at-home lunch as a kid was a tall glass of chocolate or strawberry (preferably strawberry) Quik with a PB&J sandwich and two homemade peanut butter cookies. They just aren't peanut butter cookies if you don't do the cross-h...

In case you missed it: there's been a recall of Mini-Wheats. Just the Bite Size frosted and unfrosted varieties. Now's there a surprise you would not want to find in your cereal box. I guess we really are that much closer to Shards-O-Glass freeze pops. **** In other news, cookies! I meant to make these two weeks ago but my sister left again before I had the chance. So I'm just now getting around to it-- pumpkin-oatmeal raisin cookies. I first came across this recipe a few years back--I made my mom her own recipe book for her plastic-bagged collection of recipes, some of which were twenty-plus years old. This Libby's recipe was from 1997, with double the ingredients of I what just linked here and drizzled icing. It's delicious; moist and sweet and pumpkin-y, but I would've liked them a little bit oatier (is that a word? I just made it a word). I think I'm going to go drown my sorrows over my Birds losing in the ALDS in a mug of hot chocolate.

Yes, I'm a day late. I had to take a sick day--did not feel like thinking about food at all, let alone writing about it. But a bunch of little notes started piling up, so: 1. Waah! My cereal hookup is going out of business next month. Sure, there's other branches but this one was so convenient. You'd better believe that if they have some kind of massive sale to get rid of the merchandise I will be stocking up! 2. I noticed a new ad for Fiber One 80 calorie Honey Squares the other day. The box says "now more honey and better taste." Can it top my previous "meh" review? We'll see about that. 3. Oh, another fruit butter to add to the list: McCutcheon's Pumpkin Butter. This was a gift from my grandma. I usually get Dickinson's pumpkin butter  every fall so it was good to have something to compare it to. This McCutcheon's version is definitely less sweet and seems to lean a little more on the cinnamon and nutmeg. I still like it thoug...

You see what I did there? Well, you will. So I was wondering how the drought in the Midwest would affect cereal prices, since so many of them contain corn (of course that's not the only thing to think about, but it is for the purposes of this blog). The answer: not much. As I learned from this article , the majority of cereal pricing is determined by costs relating to production, transport, marketing, and so forth. The raw materials only make up a small amount. So no need to run out and buy up your local supply of Corn Flakes. Good to know. I also wanted to share a banana bread recipe that was in People a few weeks back, but there's no link to it. So in order to make the title of this entry work (I'm stubborn), I'll have to get back to it on Thursday and type it out. Let me just say for now that I'd never worked with dried figs before--or any type of fig for that matter--so I didn't really know what to expect. They smelled kind of like prunes but once I cut...