Total

Have you ever wondered what pure %100 whole wheat looks and tastes like? Me too but I presume Total is it.

It's also %100 Calcium and %100 Nutrition. Through analogies we can conclude that wheat, nutrition, and calcium are all equal to each other but maybe my math is a little off. Or maybe General Mills's math is the fishy one.

Regardless, after diligent research I've discovered that the creators of Total cereal, no other than Mr. Charles Total and his 5 children, set out one fateful day to create the most bland cereal possible.

They would have succeeded too if Rebeca Cheerios, Snap, Crackle, and Pop never came along with their own bland cereals.

Seriously though, Total is like the celery of cereals. It's so healthy you're likely to be burning up more calories (and whatever else were not suppose to be eating in this weightophobic society) than you pick up from eating it.

Further proof of Total's lack of pizazz can be seen right on the box art. General Mills has such little faith in the stand alone taste of Total that they chose to depict it with berries for added flavor. Either that or they designed total as a sort of accompaniment cereal to fruits which still reinforces the notion of blandness. Whatever. I can imagine that this actually tastes pretty good when you're feeling bloated...or constipated.

No prize or fun puzzles on this box btw, just boring adults doing unexciting adult things, i.e. trying to eat their way to good health.

Kudos.

Recent Acquisitions

I also picked up like 5 lbs. of Grape Nuts and had a recent fling with flavored oatmeal as per recommendation in the comment section. I'll write about my experiences in due time.

Back to Breakfast

Fear not, I'm back to blogging!

For those of you wondering: over the summer, in a frustrating coincidence, both my laptop and digital camera were in my backpack when it got stolen out of my car while I was out one evening.

Both items were eventually replaced and if I really wanted to I probably could have found a way to blog before then. Really though, when your important material things are stolen from you, going out of your way to write about cereal seems a little arbitrary and depressing.

I'm shooting to continue updating on Mondays to start the weeks off right. Verb and noun agreement aside, it feels good to be back.

Also, if you have a particular cereal you enjoy and want me to try out I'm more than willing to give it a shot. Just leave a shot out in the comment section.

I wonder what kind of random, humorously marketed, delicious, or sugar laden cereal I'll eat next...

Rich Chocolaty Chex Mix

Another post from the grandparents house.


Chex mix and its many incarnations are pretty amazing when you think about it. On one hand, there's the standard salty version, while on the other there's the sweet and salty variety. Of course there's also regular boring ass plain Chex cereal too but the world needs stuff like that.

Anyways, here we have Chocolate Chex: With a Touch of Cocoa. Does that mean that it's already chocolate chex and they added extra cocoa?

Whatever.

Honestly, it tastes like someone just took plain chex cereal and added a handful of rich, chocolaty, Ovaltine (hence the blog title).

The chocolate pieces stay noticeably crunchy in milk while the plain pieces sog at a regular pace which is not bad at all.

Chocolate Chex is also about just sugary enough for sophisticated adults to eat as a guilty pleasure over the regular bland cereals I presume they eat regularly.

The best part of this cereal? Afterwards you get to drink chocolate milk!

Note that it does taste more like cocoa than chocolate so maybe the label on the box is correct and just missing a coma or two.

Really, if it has cocoa in it, doesn't that mean it's given that the product is chocolaty? Then again, Chocolate Chex: With Added Cocoa does sound better than simply Chex With Cocoa which leads me to believe I'm done complicating this.

What the hell are Cereal Straws?

The last week I was in Santa Cruz I was at Safeway and saw these. I was immediately confused and excited to try them out.


What the hell are Cereal Straws?

These things are being marketed as cereal in straw form that you use to drink and enjoy milk with. Alex Nitta pointed out a critical flaw in the cereal straw concept in that as you drink the milk and eat the straw, it becomes increasingly difficult to make the two meet.

Essentially, these are Pirouline cookies that sort of taste like the cereals they represent. They are a nice snack when driving or on the go actually though I don't think they should be marketed as cereal. They are actually the polar opposite of cereal in my opinion.

Dictionary dot com defines cereal as such:

1.any plant of the grass family yielding an edible grain, as wheat, rye, oats, rice, or corn.
2.the grain itself.
3.some edible preparation of it, esp. a breakfast food.
–adjective
4.of or pertaining to grain or the plants producing it.

which actually could qualify cereal straws as cereal, but in its colloquial understanding, these aren't cereal.

Within the straws there is a lining of soy milk which is kind of redundant when you eat them with milk. Seems like they got caught up in trying to market these as a reshaped cereal bar and instead created more of a hands on product. Whatever.

There's actually less to say about these than I thought there would be. Not as bad/weird as they sound, definitely different, nothing special really. Time will tell if they catch on.

More pictures -

I'm back!

Sorry I took 3 weeks to make a new post, school ended then summer started and I haven't been into the blogging mood. Now that things have settled down, here I am. I promise entries will be more timely from here on out but many (all 3) of you probably stopped reading.

A couple of weeks ago I made a trip to the mecca of cerealdom. Actually, it wasn't some cereal heaven but just my Grandparents house which happens to be where I spoke my first English word, cereal. They use to keep the cereals in a cabinet at floor level (perfect for children who also happen to be close to the ground), near the sink but now the cereals are near the wall.

My Grandma (Po Po) is VERY strict on healthy food. Well, she's not fascist strict but certainly very cautious and nagging, but in a concerned loving way. She runs a pretty tight ship but whenever we come to visit my Grandpa (Gung Gung) seizes the opportunity to go buy some junk food in anticipation of our arrival and snacking desires. This usually ranges from cereal (though not as often these days) to cookies and potato chips, lots and lots of potato chips. Most of these are considered contraban since they cumulatively led to Gung Gung needed (if I remember correctly) a triple by-pass heart surgery. Yikes.

Getting back to the cereal, in the morning I ate Trader Joe's Brand Banana Nut Clusters. This was a semi-unique opportunity for me since when I buy cereal, I tend to be a name brand elitist which has its ups and downs. BNC is like Honey Bunches of Oates but banana flavored and with walnuts in it. It actually tastes better than it sounds, if my description sounded unappealing to you.

Also of interest, in my family, we're all about freshness preservation. When you open the box of cereal, make sure to roll the bag down so air doesn't get in, close-pin it if you have to. I'll probably do a writeup on the importance of cereal preservation later but for now I'll leave you with this. My grandparents have the ultimate method of both keeping the cereal fresh and ant free.

Frosted Mini Wheats

http://www.mini-wheats.com/index.shtml - warning, lots of annoying mini wheat narration



My fondest memory of frosted mini wheats is from my grandma's house when I was little. I was eating the Big Bite variety and the concept of breaking up the cereal before consuming was pretty foreign to me (it still is actually). I thought it was odd that despite being called mini wheats, a single chunk barely fit on my spoon, let alone made for a practical cereal. A quick search on wikipedia confirms that I'm not alone with this experience.

We had the normal sized frosted mini wheats a couple times at home over the years but it's been a while. I figured that I'd out a couple of the new flavors (I presume) and that they would also make for an interesting blog post.

What can I say? Now that I'm an adult and my mouth has grown to adult proportions the cereal is that much more edible.

I picked up the "Maple and Brown Sugar" and Strawberry varieties. At the store, I noticed the maple, frosted, and vanilla creme (ooh, fancy) versions were adorned with Shrek 3 promotional materials, namely, turn in 5 special cardboard tokens (from 5 boxes) and get a free Shrek bowl. You could also use just 1 token and send in 3 dollars but where's the fun in that? Then again, I don't think I could stomach 5 whole boxes of this stuff.



Anyways.

I thought it was interesting that the Strawberry version didn't have the Shrek promotion, leaving me 1 token further from my free novelty bowl. When I look at the box I feel as though it's marketed to the sophisticated business woman (or man, but society tells me that pink is less masculine and so 2006) who doesn't want cartoon characters, 3D or not, displayed on her(/his) cereal box while she(/he) shops around the grocery store. Why such a sexist comment? I don't mean it as such, but where is my fucking Shrek token?!



Looking at the sides of the boxes, strawberry let's me know that eating this cereal will keep me regular, which is definitely good to know, and it is apparently part of Kellogg's Smart Start Breakfast. At the bottom they bust out the same measuring tape from Special K to reaffirm my assumption that by buying this cereal I am investing in wellness which is important with my busy lifestyle.

Maple and Brown Sugar on the other hand tells me that it's important to consume a breakfast of heroes on a daily basis but won't tell me the the exact contents of such an empowering meal. Instead, that knowledge must be earned, though I presume only true heroes at heart will have the strength and wisdom to solve this riddle. Perhaps strawberries are one of the secret ingredients (gasp, are the Strawberry Mini-Wheats also training heroes?!) since it is pictured next to the riddle. Since I know how to spell strawberry, I can tell now that no, strawberries, according to this list, are NOT for heroes.


Bonus points to the first hero to unravel all of the mysteries of morning nutritional empowerment in the comment section.

So what have we learned today? 1) that we can add another cereal to the list of grown-person cereals that you can proudly parade around in the store knowing that it will bring balance and wellness to your stressful life of excesses and 2) if you desire a box with such information instead of its equally sugar coated yet cleverly marketed siblings then you are unworthy of the Shrek bowl.