You didn’t think I’d end Thanksgiving week without reviewing something at least tangentially related to Turkey Day, did you?

It’s true: the connection between Grandma’s homemade, Thanksgiving dinner cranberry sauce and Kellogg’s Raisin Bran Granola with Cranberries and Almonds is loose at best, but play along with me here. At least this granola won’t jiggle uncomfortably or come with a side of equally uncomfortable dinner table politics.

I reviewed the honey version of Raisin Bran Granola earlier this year, and I’d like to say I intentionally saved the cranberry kind for this thematically appropriate review, but the truth is that the first variety wasn’t particularly exciting or memorable. It just tasted like hyper-toasted, nearly burnt oats. Let’s see if its fruitier cousin shares a passion for dark meat. 

There are a lot of different components in this eclectic bran mix: flakes, clusters, puffed rice and wheat, raisins, and cranberries. Try as I might, I found hardly any actual almonds, so Kellogg’s either used nut slivers so thin they cut rifts in our dimension and slipped into a different plane, or they simply baked almond flavor into the craggy clusters, too.

The 8-year old sci-fi fan fiction writer in me hopes it was the first one, but the savory almond lover in me hopes otherwise.

The flakes are mere fragments of the full-sized, meaty slabs you’d find in Raisin Bran Crunch cereal. They’re satisfyingly crunchy, but disappointingly flavorless, with merely a ghost of earthy wheat. This leads me to hypothesize that authentic bran flavor depends entirely on flake surface area. Expect my doctoral thesis on this topic some time before 2019.

The clusters are more interesting, as they retain an intensely smoked, dark golden oat flavor. They’re like the malformed, chewy and molar-gumming lovechildren of Quaker brown sugar oatmeal and a half-burnt, half-unpopped popcorn kernel. The clusters have a bold nuttiness baked into their very core, too, which, even though it means there’s no such thing as interdimensional almond portals, delights me with its salted, woodsy flavor. If I may make one more obtuse metaphor, they’re like raw Honey Nut Cheerios glaze, compacted and roasted over an open fire.

On the same skewer as the chestnuts, of course.

The puffed rice and wheat bits provide occasional, fun bursts of golden browned air, but they’re mostly there to provide a pillowy textural cushion for the granola’s other, chewier elements.

In the duet between raisin and dried cranberry, only the shriveled grapes hold their own. The raisins are as pliable as gummy bears and ooze out an authentic (though slightly mild), aged grape taste. The craisins, however, are far harder and waxier, and they only provide a light, winey taste that gets lost in the shuffle when eaten with the rest of the granola.

But no part of Cranberry Almond Raisin Bran Granola stands alone. The magic is in the mix, or more accurately, in the hybrids! See, this granola is sticky enough that the oats, flakes, and sometimes even the craisins get jammed up together into smoked, nutty, and lightly vine-ripened gobs of goodness. They’re like autumnal trail mix Voltrons.

And “autumnal trail mix” is a good overall descriptor for this granola. From the puffed rice to the elusive almond essence, everything tastes so deeply browned, backwoodsy, and barrel-aged that I can imagine finding it in my outdoorsy friend’s knapsack during a late November bonfire. The cranberry component is tragically weak—I wish Kellogg’s had just peppered the whole pouch with cinnamon instead, like they have before. And this isn’t a very good granola to eat with milk, either, since the malted, roasted almond is far more potent when dry. But overall, this is a worthwhile post-Thanksgiving, pre-Christmas granola.

I’ll happily snack on it once my bucket of leftover stuffing is gone. That particular Tupperware is large enough to house a young turkey—or transport industrial cement.

The Bowl: Kellogg’s Cranberry Almond Raisin Bran Granola

The Breakdown: A fragrant and smoky mix of roasted nut and toasted oat, with fruity bits that underperform when it counts. But sprinkle on some cinnamon, fire up the Charlie Brown Christmas special, and you’ll feel like a cozy, happy camper.

The Bottom Line: 8 uses of “meaty slabs” as a compliment out of 10

(Quick Nutrition Facts: 200 calories, 6 grams of fiber, 16 grams of sugar, and 4 grams of protein per 2/3 cup serving)