I pity the fool who doesn’t enjoy cereal power player Gabe Fonseca’s Cereal Time: a YouTube series jam-packed with more nostalgia and whole grain than that creepy Chuck e. Cheese next to a corn field your parents never let you go to.
Regular Cerealously readers know that I like to do “watch-alongs” as new episodes of this series come out, and now there are two more to share with you. These two episodes are packed with even more ’80s throwbacks than usual, so chug an Ecto-Cooler and hold on to your Dunkaroos, because Gabe’s not messing around. Continue reading →
Oh Cap’n, my…wait a minute. Yarr, this isn’t Cap’n Crunch’s Crunchberries! This be Mom’s Best Cereals’ quasi-generic rendition of Crunchberries: Jungle Berry Crunch!
Shiver me timbers: how embarrassin’! This be just like the time I meant to fly a carrier pigeon to me scurvy mate with the message “ye bringin’ the grog on the ‘morrow, matey?” and accidentally flew it to me own ma, instead. I was grounded like a landlubber for fortnights.
Oh, aye, ye may be wonderin’ whyabouts I be blubberin’ like a pirate. Well let ol’ Danbeard spin ye a briny yarn about this here cereal of the sea. Jungle Berry Crunch may sound like it belongs in some scallywag’s Zimbabwean vacation, but it tastes like something a treacherous buccaneer like ol’ Jean LaFoote himself would find when marooned on a tropical island!
I know I don’t often dabble in editorial content here on Cerealously, so feel free to ignore this if you’re only here for reviews. I just wanted to finally give a long-form answer to a question I’ve been asked a lot recently:
“What do you think about the future of breakfast cereal?”
There’s little doubt that cereal is at a crossroads. Between an increasingly health-conscious society, claims of “lazy millennial breakfasters,” and longer work hours that require on-the-go meals, it’s becoming harder and harder for some to justify a dazzling rainbow bowl of Froot Loops at 5:00 A.M.
Please, oh please, Nature Valley Chocolate Oat Bites: you have to be better than Attack of the Clones.
Let me explain what I mean by this. I recently came to the conclusion that my experience with General Mills’ new 2016 line of Nature Valley cereals closely parallels my experience watching the Star Wars films.
Nature Valley’s “original trilogy” provided an exciting plot arc. First, Chocolate Oat Clusters brought an innovative breath of fresh air to the breakfast table. With its fudgy decadence and rich clusters, Chocolate Oat Clusters gave me A New Hope that grown-up cereal could be fun.
Then Baked Oat Bites Struck Back. With layers of sour cream doughnut complexity, it improved on Cracklin’ Oat Bran’s seemingly un-improvable formula. Finally, Honey Oat Clusters happily rounded out the saga with a Return to its predecessors’ doughnut-esque delightfulness, but it lacked a sense of cliffhanging, compelling intrigue.
I thought the fun was done there, but then Nature Valley announced two more cereals. The first, Raisin Oat Clusters, was a bit of a disappointment. It was less imaginative and more dry. And unlike the other movies, The Phantom Menace didn’t even taste like a bakery dessert!
Wait a minute—I think I mixed my metaphors there.
That’s a long-winded way of explaining how Chocolate Oat Bites—the newest Nature Valley cereal—has to break the cycle. Attack of the Clones may not have been the worst Star Wars film, but I sure wouldn’t want to watch it for breakfast every morning. Continue reading →
Today marks the one year anniversary of July 5th, 2015: the day I woke up in a post-potato salad & fireworks daze and decided it’d be a good idea to launch a website about breakfast cereal. Call me sentimental, but looking back on it makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.
Or maybe that’s just yesterday’s potato salad again.
365 days, 133 reviews, thousands of kind readers, and countless happy calories later, Cerealously is still alive and kickin’ it: no sugar crash here. I’ve had the chance to taste some cereal-ously tasty stuff (it’s my birthday, I’m allowed to make lazy, self-referential puns), as well as a few that really tested my taste buds. I wanted to give a better visualization of this past year’s reviews, so I went back, tallied the scores, and made this:
As you can see, I love cereal: so much so that I have a hard time giving below average scores. But it isn’t just cereal contained in that Honey Nut Cheerios-colored graph, either. Those bars also represent the many Pop-Tarts, cereal bars, oatmeal, granola, and yes—even Taco Bell Cap’n Crunch Delights—that I stuffed in my face, all in the name of showing the public what makes breakfast so “grrreat!”
For those wondering, the lone “1 rating” in there is from when I ate a 3-year old box Frute Brute. Sometimes I still taste its stale ghost haunting my cereal bowl.
Since there are so many cool things in this first year to look back at, I thought I’d do a good ol’ fashioned countdown of my “Favorite Five Blog Entries from Year 1.” So without further ado, let’s relive 365 days in the course of 5 unnecessarily rambling blog posts. Click any of the titles to read the full thing: Continue reading →
Since I’ll be spending tomorrow stuffing my face with hot dogs while watching others competitively stuff their faces with lemonade-soaked hot dogs, I figured I’d go light today by munching on Kellogg’s seasonal Limited Edition Red, White, and Blue Rice Krispies.
Truth be told, I’m glad the only Independence Day-themed cereal available this year (we’ve had Summer Berry Pebbles before) is this one. Since it tastes exactly the same as normal Rice Krispies, I can celebrate this most laid-back holiday of the year with an appropriately laid-back review.
So, uh, yeah: if you’ve had Rice Krispies, then these taste the same. No strawberry or blueberry taste—just neon colored food dye soaked into airy rice crisp niblets. They don’t really taste like anything, for that matter. If you grit your teeth and focus like Jimmy Neutron during a brain blast, there are notes of lingering toastiness, but few people are likely to eat these as a traditional cereal (whether dry or with mush-ifying milk) anyway.
These Red, White, and Blue Rice Krispies are destined to be bathed in butter and marshmallow for use in Rice Krispies Treats. I would have made some for the purposes of this review, but I’m saving all my butter and marshmallow fluff for use in my annual “Fourth Of July Butter ‘n’ ‘Mallow Slip’n Slide,” a tradition that I totally didn’t just invent to explain why I don’t have the ingredients for Rice Krispies Treats in my house.
My family just loves apostrophes, okay?
Instead, I made you this to make up for it. These Red, White, and Blue Rice Krispies lose points for not tasting especially fun and for not having enough red and blue pieces, but in the spirit of the holiday, I’ll give ’em a few extra just for being so darn festive. Don’t hesitate to buy a box if you ever wanted to make your own cereal American flag.
Or your own cereal flag for Australia, Cambodia, Chile, the Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, the Faroe Islands, France, Haiti, Iceland, North Korea, Laos, Liberia, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Nepal, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Russia, Samoa, Schleswig-Holstein, Serbia, Sint Maarten, Slovakia, Slovenia, Taiwan, Thailand, or United Kingdom, for that matter.
Uh, yeah, there are a lot of red, white, and blue flags.
Happy early Fourth of July, everyone: I hope all your fireworks Snap, Crackle, and Pop!
The Bowl: Rice Krispies with Red & Blue Krispies
The Breakdown: They’re Rice Krispies. They taste like Rice Krispies. Also there are red and blue ones. I want hot dogs.
The Bottom Line: 7.4 (see what I did there?) hot dog bun-shaped Rice Krispies Treats out of 10
(Quick Nutrition Facts: 120 calories, 0 grams of fiber, 4 grams of sugar, and 2 grams of protein per 1 1/4 cup serving)
“No no, you must have misheard me,” I said to the cashier. “I want to buy Annie’s Berry Bunnies cereal, not Very Moneys cereal. In fact. I don’t think Very Moneys is even grammatically correct.”
And that’s how I ended up making a cashier grimace and walking home with a $5+ box of cereal.
I’ve joked before about how Annie’s three new organic cereals are hare-raisingly expensive, and how in the case of Frosted Oat Flakes, it made me not want to purchase them again. Yet here I am, pouring another bowl of mauve & marmalade colored baby rabbits. If you weren’t impressed enough with those color names, allow me to consult my Behr Paint Color Guide and get even more specific:
“…another bowl of Muscat Grape and Acapulco Sun colored baby rabbits.”
There, that one would make even a Home Depot employee proud.
