There is a storied era in my life, one marked by a fleeting—or perhaps flaking—fixation with Fiber One. This was no regular phase (and yet, it very much was); in fact, I look back at it fondly as the deliberate death and rebirth of my true cereal passion.
At the time, I grew worried that my sugary cereal habits were contributing to a hollow hunger dissatisfied with airy rice and now-empty bowls of emptier calories. To make up for it, I dived headfirst into every cereal Fiber One released at the time, to knock off those gnawing cravings with a real gut-buster/duster/cluster. Chocolate Squares, Honey Squares, Honey Clusters, and even original Fiber One—a bona fide gut-readjuster at 55% of your daily recommended fiber per 1/2 cup serving…
…which I’d eat a full cup or more of before even leaving the house. Some say the gargantuan belly gurgles that followed were nationally registered as deep-sea sonar anomalies.
I eventually grew tired of these breakfast bombshells and used the experience to synthesize a happier balance of morning sweets and sticks, ultimately making me a more well-rounded cereal blogger. That’s why I’m more than happy to both review and defend Fiber One from dismissive cereal critics. Because if a Fruity Pebbles-centric diet has left you groggy and gravelly, something like these new Strawberries & Vanilla Clusters might just mix things up without churning them up. Continue reading →
You ever see Carpenter’s The Thing? You know, the one with the cute dogs and frosty alien visitors that nefariously replicate human life? Well in its 1951 ancestor film, the evil extraterrestrial is made of blood-lusted plant life. Now I’m not saying we should call up Kurt Russell, but it seems like Trader Joe’s latest cereal might have mixed the parasites with the parsnips, because it appears to be a familiar flavor with more vivid veggie DNA.
Trader Joe’s Neapolitan Puffs likely their Cocoa Puffs-mimicking concept and flamboyantly show-stopping box design as a glamour, to hide its most basic ingredients: beans and brown rice. Now, I will concede that there is a niche of noshers out there whose mindful eating habits would be excited by a more excitingly flavored, gluten-free alternative cereal, but in my experience most beaned breakfast cereals can never seem to properly complement (let alone mask) the lingering legume flavors of its constituent ingredients.
Not to mention the fact that Cocoa Puffs Ice Cream Scoops were a clumsily taste-balanced mirage of perfumed maize, in their own right. Two cones way down.
I’m not saying the deck is stacked against Trader Joe’s Neapolitan Puffs, but I will say that if whatever pallet of wine the cereal is stacked against in the TJ’s were to topple onto it, it likely wouldn’t be a great loss (and may taste way more intoxicatingly juicy).
Thanks to redditor /u/obleake for sharing this photo. If you have a fresh cereal scoop of your own, ice creamed or otherwise, we welcome them on our Submissions page.
Thought Chicken & Waffles Cereal was going to get lonely in your pantry, ostracized by the other, “normal” cereals? Well fear no more: Post & the temporarily name-tweaked Honey Brunches of Oats are raising another barnyard cereal for National Cereal Day, so both sweet-meat munchies can find solidarity together as they slowly expire on your shelves.
Well, maybe. While I’ve voiced my hesitations about faux-flesh-flavored cereals, I have to admit the possibility that they may actually be good. After all, Maple Bacon is a bit more tame—especially given its pastried precedent—and given Post’s recent doughnutted decadence, I’m certainly willing to give this one a hearty (but hopefully not hot-doggy) try.
These Honey Brunches of Oats cereals will be hitting Walmart on or around 3/7/19. Though there’s still no word on whether the brand plans to complete their essential meat trilogy with Sweet & Spicy Hunan Beef Bites.
What’s the cure for a stressful schedule? Stack up your queue and call it a day.
Yes, The Empty Bowl is back after a brief, technologically stymied hiatus, and cohost Justin McElroy and I have brought a number of appropriately hollow platitudes with it. The latest appetizing apparition in our meditative cereal mirage of a podcast, Eight is pretty much my favorite episode yet.
On the menu this time? Morning mystery meats, massive quantities of powdered sugar, and a cereal myth so sweet you could hang your (clearly labelled) hat on it. To that last point, anyone curious to see the SPOILER ALERT…Quaker PB & J replica box discussed can find it here.
If this is your first trip to our great cereal bowl in the sky, you can find more 20–30 minute delectable de-compression chambers at our Anchor hub, follow along on Twitter, or send in a listener question. We can’t discuss or respond to every email, but I assure you that each one still subconsciously informs my shopping lists (so be sure to subliminally mention doughnuts more often—and maybe cauliflower, for balance).
See, back in my day, when you wanted to create a mythical hybrid creature, you just smashed two normal animals together and called it a day. Like the Liger: a good, honest, all-American legend bred for its magical abilities. Not like that bootleg real liger.
But I digress. The point is that Kellogg’s boldly spliced Caticorn is but a cop out—a combination of cats and unicorns (themselves hybrids of horses and narwhals, in my brain) that merely piggybacks off the latter cryptid’s bubblegum-pop popularity. I’d rather they forged a new path, like combining cats and pandas. Or cats and koalas. Or even forging a new cat-egory of lifeform by merging cats and redwood trees.
What’s the cereal equivalent of a Bigfoot hunter? A crisp-tozoologist?
Whatever it is, I want a job doing it for the Smithsonian. Empty Bowl listeners should already be familiar with my love of cereal myths—talking about the same cereal legends all day has me craving a tasty enigma—and much like last year’s Freedom Crunch fiasco, I’m proud to report on another cold cereal case, developing in real time.
It’s about a certain Kellogg’s Splatoon 2 Cereal, and I’ve labelled it a loose rumor, despite having no evidence beyond the photographed screen above. There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of this possible Nintend-elicious successor to Super Mario Cereal, but other facts that help this story hold milk. Let’s run through the facts:
• This first and only photo came to light just a few days ago, shared by Reddit user /u/carloscd44. They claim to have stumbled upon it on Walmart’s website while looking for other new cereals, but after returning to the page the day after, it was gone, leaving the OP and viewers alike uncertain about its legitimacy.
• To clear up initial fears of fake leaks—a problem that has notoriously plagued the Nintendo Super Smash Bros. community—I confirmed that the URL the OP presented is (or at least was) a real part of Walmart’s site. Now, the link redirects visitors to a page for Super Mario Cereal.
This suggests to me that the cereal was either posted ahead of its planned release, and the URL will remain until it’s time, or Kellogg’s scrapped the cereal concept entirely, and this was a leftover and hitherto undiscovered page.
• While I’d love to believe the former is the case, the clearly unfinished box art presented leaves more questions than answers. Splatoon 2 the video game was first released almost two years ago now, and while the game still releases new content, this time gap is far larger than Super Mario Cereal, which debuted the same month as Super Mario Odyssey.
Back to the box art itself, we can see lots of awkward empty space, seemingly incomplete Inkling models, cereal that cannot be clearly seen, and a logo that bizarrely uses a paint splatter to cover up part of the word CEREAL—which, in itself, appears to use the same font as Super Mario Cereal.
Adding all this up, plus the fact that I can’t dig up any other info about it online, makes me very hesitant to make any confident conclusion on Splatoon 2 Cereal’s legitimacy. In my eyes, the most convincing clue is the timing: the fact that the page went down the same day /u/carloscd44 found it seems like quite the convenient coincidence, but whether I’ll be wrapping my tentacles around a bowl of it or just crossing it off my rumors list with red ink remains to be seen.
If you have any information about Splatoon 2 Cereal, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’ll even play you on Final Destination for it—no items, of course.
You’ve heard of snack attacks, but what about sneack attacks?
No, that’s not a typo: I firmly believe that Honey Bunches of Oats has perfected the art of the 800-pound guerrilla breakfast bombardment. Not even counting the recent, off-brand and Internet-splintering news of Honey Brunches of Oats Chicken & Waffles Cereal, the now 30-year old cereal brand has a history of dropping sneakily scrumptious new flavors at the start of the year, without the preemptive fanfare we see from most crunch-slingers.
In 2016, the masters of crispy (fried poultry or otherwise) flakes and granola bunches brought back Chocolate Honey Bunches of Oats, and in 2018 we got the criminally underrated Pecan & Maple Brown Sugar HBoOats. Pulling another break-fast one on us, 2019 has now been blessed with Apple Caramel Crunch Honey Bunches of Oats.
More than just an exciting concept, this is only the second major caramel apple cereal after 2011’s bone-mealed Caramel Apple Boulders. Where caramel apple’s sister flavor, apple cinnamon, gets a lot of cereal aisle representation—including an apparently discontinued(?) Honey Bunches variety—I’m glad to see its stickier sibling finally getting exposure.
Even if it is half a year before caramel apple’s typical seasonal setting of booing and bobbing. Guess I’ll just have to cut some eyeholes in my winter-grade weighted blanket before eating.
I don’t care if loving their pastel colors, minimalistic anatomy, and chibi countenance makes me any less of a gritty, macho cereal blogger—sorry, Mr. Universe: I’m declining the invitation—Peeps will always be welcome on my couch and in my Easter basket, even if I end up forgetting a few half-eaten packages of them under my bed.
My dad will never let me live down that now-mummified mistake.
Aesthetic enchantment aside, I will concede that the flavor and texture of Peeps is a polarizing and tinglingly molarizing issue. While I appreciate topiary marshmallow art when it’s seasonally appropriate, I can empathize with those who avoid the chicks and bunnies like glittered styrofoam.
Because even for me, the initial thought of a Peeps Cereal seemed foreboding. Along with Sour Patch Kids Cereal and upcoming Chicken & Waffles Cereal, it felt as if three of the four cereal horsemen of the apocalypse were leading their steeds away from milky troughs and into battle. And seeing that it’s a “marshmallow-flavored cereal with marshmallows” only made me welcome whatever cereal Death’s white mare will rear (Scynnamon Scythes?).
But then I saw the box, and my worries melted into a childish frenzy of “gotta try it” tunnel vision. I mean, just look at those loop colors: I want a beaded curtain of ’em! So whether you’re a Peeps fan or protestor, join me in my trip down the double-‘mallowed rabbit hole. Continue reading →
