random food thoughts

A very serious ranking of Cheerios

Photo by author. I wonder if the next edition will be SAD HEART SHAPES.

When I was a kid, I ate candy for breakfast. By which I mean cereal where sugar was the first five ingredients. Some of them even had sugar right in the name, like Sugar Smacks. Mmm, Sugar smacks…

As an adult, I try to be a little more sensible with cereals, so I bade farewell to my buddies Cap’n Crunch and Count Chocula. To be fair, skipping Cap’n Crunch has saved me from countless mouth lacerations.

One of my go-to healthier picks now is Cheerios, which is recent years has expanded into a Cheerios Empire, with more flavours than you can shake a stick made out of whatever passed for those weird crunchy “marshmallows” in Count Chocula. I have not tried every flavour, and the sugar content ranges from almost none to first five ingredients.

Here is how I rank Cheerios, of the ones I’ve tried:

  1. Multigrain Cheerios. This is probably the closest to pure Cheerios while adding a bit more variety. It’s also the lowest in sugar to the original. It tastes good, but not so good that I will eat half a box at one sitting.
  2. Original Cheerios. Something about the blandness of having nothing added accentuates the simple oat flavour. As a bonus, it has almost no sugar and because its flavour is merely pleasant, I don’t gorge on it.
  3. Chocolate Cheerios. Not as high in sugar as you’d think. It is sweet, but not overly so and, of course, you end up with chocolate milk in the bowl. Yum! An occasional treat.
  4. Honey Nut Cheerios. I actually haven’t tried this in years, but I remember it being sweet, but not too sweet. I may have had a less discerning palate back in the olden days, though. It ranks lower because of the sugar/honey content, and I haven’t felt compelled to try it again due to that.
  5. Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. I finally tried these recently. The sugar content is on the higher side. It tastes heavy, somehow. I would not gorge on this, nor do I think I would try it again. If it was Cheerios with a hint of apple and cinnamon flavouring (like, aimed at adults), I’d probably like it a lot more.

There are a billion other flavours out there, because it seems like they’re throwing a lot out there to see what sticks, but these are the ones I’ve tried.

For the cereal curious, the other cereals I eat semi-regularly are:

  • Crispix (low sugar, light and crunchy)
  • Reese Peanut Butter Puffs (guilty pleasure, but lower in sugar than you might think)
  • Rice Chex (like Crispix, but Crispix is better)

Not gourmet food

Today, I discovered ketchup-flavored Goldfish crackers at the grocery store. It was hard to miss, actually, as they had a whole end cap filled with them. They’re apparently a limited time thing. I, being a Canadian, had to get some.

And I like them. I like them almost too much, even as I think they are also sort of revolting. I’m going to try to limit myself to just the one bag until they are gone from the shelves, with only memories of red-stained fingers left behind. If I buy another bag, I will be sad at my lack of self-control. And I’ll need to wash my hands again.

Yummy yummy yummy I got red-stained crackers in my tummy

(I nicked the image from the walmart.ca site. Oddly, this is one of the rare times when DuckDuckGo’s search failed me–I had to use Google to find the photo.)

I don’t know where the nearest McDonald’s is

I consider this progress in my quest to eat healthier and better (no offense to McDonald’s, which does have healthy choices on its menu).

But now that I think about it, I could really go for a Sausage and Egg McMuffin. I love those things.

I have now used internet technology to find the closest McDonald’s, and it’s apparently a 29-minute walk from my place, or five Starbucks away. How is this even possible? What sort of world do we live in that I need to walk for almost an entire half hour just to get a McChicken? This is way beyond impulse purchase territory for me.

Which is for the best, really. But still.

When life gives you lemons…

You throw those lemons at people you don’t like.

Just kidding.

The other day I was in the grocery store, buying groceries, as one does, and I was in the pie filling aisle. I can’t actually think of the proper name for the aisle. Baking goods, maybe? Anyway, it’s where the cans of pie filling were and it made me sad because while they had many expected flavors (cherry, blueberry and the yuckfest known as mincemeat), the best one of all was missing: raisin.

I love raisin pie. But I can’t remember the last time I had raisin pie because they have become like a unicorn. When I lived downtown, I used to buy these “individual” sized raisin pies at Super Valu for $1.99 or something. They were so very yummy. I also by coincidence weighed close to 200 pounds.

Since those halcyon days, I have found it increasingly rare to find raisin pie and today it seems to have vanished entirely. Sure, there’s apple pie, and it’s good, but it’s not the same. There are no raisins in apple pie.

Even if I wanted to make my own, stores don’t seem to sell premade raisin pie filling, as noted above. I suppose I could make raisin pie from scratch. I could also wash my clothes by beating them on stones at the river, too. There are some things I’m just not likely to do.

So for now and perhaps forever, I shall lament the loss of the raisin pie.

I stared at myself while eating gelato today

At the conclusion of our afternoon of walking a whole lot, Nic became quietly obsessed with having some gelato for dessert. After fruitlessly searching along Davie Street, he turned to technology (Google) to save us and we made our way to a place near Robson and Bute. They have a row of seats along a counter and on the wall in front of the counter is a large mirror. This means you get to stare at yourself while eating your gelato. I found it mildly unnerving. Then I took a picture of myself in the mirror, with my eyebrows slightly raised, because this is apparently a thing I do nearly every time I take a picture of myself. I don’t know why.

It’s gelato, not poo, I swear.

The perspective is kind of weird in the shot, because my right hand looks to be about the same size as my head, which it is not.Also, I am not a goth despite all the black I’m wearing. Not to my knowledge, anyway (I do own three albums by The Cure.)

I only *thought* I ate pizza…

I use MyFitnessPal to track what I eat (today is the 2,280th day in a row I’ve logged in, in fact) and the phone app allows you to scan the bar codes of packaged food, to conveniently add them to your list of foods consumed.

Tonight we had a Delissio three meat frozen pizza for dinner. This is how MFP scanned it:

Now I’m wondering what I really ate.

What’s the deal with Goldfish crackers?

There’s an entire section of the food industry devoted to Goldfish crackers. They come in a variety of sizes and flavors, but all of them are shaped like goldfish and usually orange-colored. For obvious reasons, they have chosen not to emulate the look of a black moor, since a black cracker would be kind of gross-looking (they do come in brown, though).

I’m guessing–because I’m too lazy to search the internet right now–that someone thought it would be cute to make little orange crackers shaped like fish, but not tasting like fish, as that would also be gross, like black crackers.

But who wants to eat a cracker shaped like a fish? It’s not like it’s a great association. Fish are stinky and slimy, crackers are crunchy and yummy. Fish can be yummy, too, but science has yet to transfer that into cracker form (or maybe it has. Like I said, I’m too lazy to check).

Now, Goldfish crackers are indeed yummy. I can open a bag and my hand assumes an automatic motion where it grabs crackers from the bag, shoves them into my mouth, then continues until the bag is empty or I exercise the barest smidgen of self-control and place the bag on the top of a difficult-to-reach shelf. Still, Goldfish crackers do not taste like goldfish, so the whole concept is wrong. It’s like making crackers shaped like worms. No one wants to eat worms, not even cracker worms. Okay, someone out there probably does, but there’s no way they’re getting them (unless they already exist).

Anyway, now I want some Goldfish crackers, so I guess you win this round, Goldfish crackers!

Grapefruit: Why bother?

I remember eating grapefruit as a kid (not at the same time as corn dogs) and it always involved two things:

  • that weird triangle-shaped spoon you used to cut into the grapefruit flesh:
  • lots of sugar

Adding sugar to a grapefruit basically turned it into sour, sugary candy fruit. There’s some nutritional value buried under all that sugar, but really, why not just eat something not incredibly sour-tasting that you won’t drown in sugar? And every kid I knew did this–and every parent let them. The Sugar Days, as we called ’em.

We were kind of dumb in the old days. Do people still eat sugar-encrusted grapefruit now? My hunch says…yes. Maybe they use Splenda instead, though. “Just one drop, Jimmy, that’s all you need. Jimmy, don’t squirt the bottle on it!”

Corn dogs: Why?

I can’t remember the last time I had a corn dog. It was probably at a fair when I was in my teens, so about three hundred years ago. But when I think about them, they just seem weird. You take a wiener and coat it in a thick layer of fried cornmeal. It’s just an odd thing to decide to turn into a dish. I can’t even remember if I liked them. I kind of want to try one again but there’s no easy way other than buying an entire box of them in the grocer freezer. Then I’d have to figure out what to do with the rest of them. Donate them to orphans? Turn them into fertilizer? Science experiments?

But maybe this is a case where it’s better to let sleeping (corn) dogs lie.

Also, I categorized this post under Health, though I’m not entirely sure it qualifies.