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For those of you who may not know it, I am considered a Blogging Purist. Being considered as such, it is important that I maintain transparency in these reviews that I do. Therefore, it is in that interest of maintaining credibility that I have something to admit.

I love chocolate chips.

I love chocolate chips in cookies. I love chocolate chips in muffins. I love chocolate chips in brownies, blondies, cake, and especially chocolate chip crumb loaf. I LOVE CHOCOLATE CHIPS STRAIGHT OUT OF THE BAG AND DOWN MY GULLET!

So yeah… I love chocolate chips. So is it any wonder that I love the Quaker Chocolate Chip Granola Bars? There’s just something very comforting about a chewy 100 calorie granola bar with real chocolate bringing on that sharp sweetness with a tang that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Maybe it’s because my mom used to throw them into my lunch going to school as a kid so that sharp sweet taste brings back fond memories.

Wait. I hated school.

It has to be the chocolate chips.

Taste: Pretty darn flavorful
Box opening: No problem
Bag rippage: The wrapper comes off very easily… VERY easily when opened right
Bag slippage: N/A
Sog factor: N/A
Allergy alert: Contains Wheat, Milk, Peanut, and Soy ingredients.

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about Quaker Chocolate Chip Granola Bars please visit the Quaker Product Page.

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As of today, 01/28/2009, Quaker Peanut Butter And Chocolate Granola Bars have NOT been placed on the FDA Recall List for the Salmonella Typhimurium contamination of Peanut Butter. For a complete list of recalled products please visit the FDA Website or you can follow the FDA Recalls on Twitter @FDArecalls.

While breakfast is still generally accepted as the most important meal of the day, the truth is that most Americans don’t take the time to actually eat it. One of the biggest breakfast replacements are granola bars such as the ones made by the Quaker Oats company. I mean hey… they make oatmeal… so why not a good breakfast substitute in the form of a granola bar?

As a connoisseur of mixing chocolate and peanut butter together, this was a huge disappointment to me. There never seemed to be a moment when I was able to get both the chocolate and peanut butter tastes to merge in my mouth for a truly satisfying flavor. The worst part of the experience was that the peanut butter tasted like a stale processed paste that someone had left out on a hot day in July down in Georgia. Yes… basically the devil came to the granola bar.

At a very reasonable 100 calories, this can be an enjoyable snack midday but this really can’t be a substitute for a meal. Now if only Quaker would do something about the taste.

Taste: Bleh X 2
Box opening: No problem
Bag rippage: The wrapper comes off very easily… its quite slutty in fact
Bag slippage: N/A
Sog factor: N/A
Allergy alert: Contains Wheat, Milk, Peanut, and Soy ingredients.

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about Quaker Peanut Butter And Chocolate Granola Bars please visit the Quaker Product Page.

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Quaker Granola

Quaker Oats is generally considered to be the top name brand for all things oats such as oatmeal and granola. They are called Quaker Oats for a reason dontcha know.

There were a few problems with the cereal starting right away with the packaging. While the Quaker box was listed as 2 ounces less than the Wegmans brand, it just felt heavier and denser. The box opening was not the easiest and the bag was just plain difficult. In both cases, there was rippage that would definitely decrease the shelf life of the cereal if kept in the original packaging. The taste was a relatively stale taste in comparison, and although we prefer a crispy cereal this one reminded us a little too much of Grape Nuts, and we all know what kind of a debacle that is. It is painfully obvious that they’re slipping off their game with something that should be one of their flagship brands.

Quaker was sadly a really big disappointment in this comparison to me. Then I found out that they’re spending all their money catering to mommy bloggers on Inauguration Day for some cheap PR instead of putting out a solid product they could be proud of.

Taste: A slight stale oat taste with a sweet pop
Box opening: Medium difficulty to open with extreme rippage
Bag rippage: Heavy difficulty to open with both bag and box rippage
Bag slippage: None!
Sog factor: The sog factor was minimal. The cereal remained crisp and actually quite hard, similar to the consistency of Grape Nuts
Allergy alert: Contains milk, wheat, and almond ingredients

NYCWD’s Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

Poppy’s Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

Wegmans Granola

Every now and then you get a cereal brand that surprises you… and that is this box of Wegmans brand of granola. While opening the box was easy, there was some rippage of the packaging. The bag was slightly more difficult with some additional rippage. Then there was huge bag slippage from the box with the one handed pour, which we all know is a huge disadvantage especially for those under the gun in the morning when the alarm clock went off 15 minutes late, the kids missed the school bus, and the cat puked all over the clean laundry. Still, all these things can be overcome by the strength of one simple factor.

Taste. The taste of Wegmans Granola was a strong fresh taste with a snap of sweetness to it. Further consumption allows the medley of raisins and almond slices to further enhance the cereal with a simple variation on the taste giving it a sense of complexity while remaining earthy. The sog factor, what little of it there was, actually improved the cereal by adding elasticity to the bite. To put it simple, the addition of the milk had the cereal tasting like a granola bar… which also happens to be one of Quaker’s mainstays.

Taste: Soft chewy and sweet oats
Box opening: Easy to open with some rippage
Bag rippage: Medium difficulty to open with some minor bag rippage
Bag slippage: Huge slippage from the box
Sog factor: The sog factor of this cereal is minimal, and actually welcomed in softening it from it’s extra hard natural consistency. The milk actually seemed to make the cereal chewy and more enjoyable
Allergy alert: Contains milk, tree nuts, wheat, and soy. MAY CONTAIN Pecans & Walnuts from the manufacturing process

NYCWD’s Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

Poppy’s Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

And The Winner Is…

As if there was even a doubt.

Not.

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Welcome to a second week in a row of cereal straws! Maybe this week’s cereal straw will be completely and radically different than last week’s one-bowl worthy straw…

Apple Jacks Cereal Straws are a new product on the market. Emulating their parent cereal, the straws themselves are green and orange, but are filled with a sugary milk-like substance so that when you drink milk through the straw you hypothetically will taste sweet yumminess as you drink. Unfortunately, my experience was that the straws themselves tasted a little like cinnamon but mostly like the cardboard the straws were boxed in. Anyone who has ever eaten Apple Jacks cereal knows that this is not the experience I should have had. I should have had an explosion of cinammony goodness in my mouth! But… nope. And after only a few minutes soaking in the milk the straws seem to shred and fall apart in the glass. True disappointment.

The straws are also not so pleasing healthwise. Per 3-straw serving there are 140 calories, 3.5 grams of fat, 24 grams of carbohydrates with no dietary fiber, and only 2 grams of protein. There is 10% of the Guideline Daily Amount of vitamins A, B6, B12, and D, as well as Thiamin, Riboflavin, and Niacin, which really isn’t much to be proud of.

Considering the high calorie count per serving for very little nutritional benefit and a ton of allergens in a product that tastes absolutely horrible, I recommend taking a pass on Apple Jacks Cereal Straws. No redemption from last week’s Marbits! Oh well.

Taste: Like cardboard
Box opening: No problem
Bag rippage: No problem, but the tray foil packaging is not easily re-sealable
Bag slippage: N/A
Sog factor: Anything greater than 5 minutes and it starts to shed its outer layers like a snake
Allergy alert: Contains Wheat, Milk, Eggs, and Soy ingredients. It may (which means it is processed in a plant and these items may fall into the product therefore you should assume it does) contain Tree Nuts and Peanuts

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about Apple Jacks Cereal Straws please visit the Kellogg’s website.

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When Kelloggs first announced their Cereal Straw line, I was kind of wondering what exactly it was they were going after. Here they are selling cereal, which under normal circumstances is consumed with milk in a bowl, so are these straws to suck the milk out of the bowl as opposed to simply raising the bowl to one’s lips?

Once I opened the packaging I realized the truth about Froot Loops Cereal Straws. It’s packaging indicated that this is an entirely different food not meant to be exclusively consumed in conjunction with the cereal line or for that matter even for breakfast. The actual straws appear comprised of thin layers wrapped upon one another of the cereal around what looks like white frosting in the middle of the tube. For lack of a better comparison, they look like a carbon copy of Pepperidge Farm Traditional Pirouette Cookies that was designed and packaged specifically for kids.

The product is packaged into two separate plastic tray containers in foil packaging. Each tray holds a dozen of the straws. Once you open up a tray though, there is no way to re-seal it to keep the other straws in it fresh. Now if I was actually going to use this as a straw, I would have a huge issue with this packaging method considering that as a straw I would only use one at a time. Even if I used one straw at every meal (breakfast, lunch, dinner)… by the fourth meal the straws would start tasting stale and dried out. This really was a poor packaging design considering the product name and is misleading regarding its functionality.

Although the straws are all different colors, they each have the exact same fruity taste of the cereal. A real win for Kelloggs would have been for the yellow ones to taste like a lemon, the orange ones to taste like an orange, and the red ones to taste like a cherry. Unfortunately they chose to go with the generic taste of the cereal and just add in the white uber-sugary frosting on the inside of the tube. That white uber-sugary frosting by the way, really did not sweeten the milk as originally thought. For it to actually sweeten the milk, the straw would need to remain in the milk so long that the outside would start shedding like a snake and just make a general mess of the milk. Not cool at all.

Taste: Uber Sweetened Froot Loops
Box opening: No problem
Bag rippage: No problem, but the tray foil packaging is not easily re-sealable
Bag slippage: N/A
Sog factor: Anything greater than 5 minutes and it starts to shed it’s outer layers like a snake
Allergy alert: Contains Wheat, Milk, Eggs, and Soy ingredients. It may (which means it is processed in a plant and these items may fall into the product therefore you should assume it does) contain Tree Nuts and Peanuts

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about the cereal please visit the Froot Loops Cereal Straws website.

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We’re ringing in the New Year by finally reviewing a cereal that has been on the “please review it” list for a very. long. time.

Named after its unique shape, Post Honeycomb is a semi-sweet whole grain corn and oat cereal that stays true to its name by containing real honey. Out of the box and after a soak the combs themselves aren’t particularly sweet tasting, but if you eat them in milk really quickly you’ll taste that golden honey goodness packed into every comb. Once the sweetness leaves the comb it tastes pretty much exactly like Cheerios. I love Cheerios! (Then again, how can I not? I’m English-American.) NYCWD doesn’t care for Cheerios. In either case, a sweetened cereal really has no business tasting like an imitation of another cereal, especially one that isn’t sweet tasting.

Post Honeycomb is part of the Kraft Sensible Solution program, offering an excellent source of whole grain and 10 vitamins and minerals. Its per 1.5 cup serving contains 130 calories, 1 gram of fat, 28 grams of carbohydrates, 2 grams of dietary fiber, and 2 grams of protein. It offers 15% recommended daily value of Vitamin A and Iron, and 25% of Thiamin, Riboflavin, Niacin, Vitamin B6, Folic Acid, and Vitamin B12. It should be noted that while these numbers may seem typical of most cereals, the serving size is not. Post Honeycomb offers a serving size of 1.5 cups compared to the typical 1 cup or 3/4 cup serving size of most other cereals. This does give added value by providing the eater with a sense of a fuller meal at the same proportional nutritional value as other cereals that would give a less fulfilling experience.

Honeycomb sadly has no toys but it does offer Postokens redeemable at a Webkinz-like world at Postopia.com. Kids play with virtual toys these days anyway, so maybe Post knows what they’re doing! Stay tuned for a complete exposé of Postopia, written by NYCWD himself!

Special Mascot Correction Announcement: The mascot is not actually a bear as originally reported by NYCWD in this week’s episode. It is, in fact, a rodentesque “thing” that the most reliable source on the internet refers to as a chupacabra. Best mascot ever!!!
[source]

Taste: Like Cheerios! Which would be fine if they were Cheerios…
Box opening: No problem
Bag rippage: A little bit
Bag slippage: None
Sog factor: No soggies for a very long time
Allergy alert: Manufactured on equipment that processes wheat

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about the cereal please visit the Post website.

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Kellogg’s Eggo Maple Syrup Cereal is a crunchy waffle-shaped cereal made from wheat and corn flour. I erroneously said this was a corn based cereal in the video. It’s partly corn, but wheat and oat are the dominating carbohydrates. It looks a lot like Honey Combs on the box! But inside tells a very different story… a story of an alien symbol that confused me greatly when I was staring at it. And then I ate it and stopped worrying what it looked like because that maple syrup flavor (which tastes a lot more like pure brown sugar) packed a huge punch to my taste buds.

Sweet like Cap’n Crunch but doesn’t rip up the roof of your mouth? A dream cereal! There’s nothing particularly unique about Eggo Maple Syrup, but the combination of wheat and corn stops the sog from happening quickly, and I definitely appreciate that. By the end of the bowl the milk is sickeningly sweet so you may want to drink up half-way through or hurry up and eat the whole bowl.

Eggo Maple Syrup per 1 cup serving contains 110 calories, 1.5 grams of fat, 25 grams of carbohydrates, 2 grams of dietary fiber, and 2 grams of protein. It offers 25% recommended daily value of Vitamin C, Iron, Thiamin, Riboflavin, Niacin, Vitamin B6, Folic Acid, and Vitamin B12.

In addition to a tasty cereal, Kellogg’s offers Adidas sports tees “for free” by mailing in 8 Get Up & Go tokens — from 8 boxes of cereal — so that you can wear them to try their zig zag tag drill and burn the calories from the cereal. Plus, the box includes quick facts about how many calories are burned by the average kid during 30 minutes of sports participation. Way to promote that healthy lifestyle, Kellogg’s!

Taste: Like Cap’n Crunch on brown sugar steroids
Box opening: Hard on the edges, easy in the middle
Bag rippage: A little… and a little tough to open.
Bag slippage: None!
Sog factor: No soggies for a very long time
Allergy alert: Contains wheat ingredients and a trace amount of soybean

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about the cereal please visit the Kellogg’s website.

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With the waning time of daylight hours signaling the beginning of the journey to the cold winter months for the northern hemisphere there are those of us who need something… different… in the morning. Quaker Apples and Cinnamon Instant Oatmeal is that something different.

When I was a child, my mother would make me oatmeal every morning from December through February. It was plain, bland, sludgy oatmeal. Because of this torturous experience, I disdained oatmeal for a decade. Luckily for the children of today, Quaker Apples and Cinnamon Instant Oatmeal is not my mother’s oatmeal. It is tasty, sweet, and its consistency may simply be determined by its length of cooking time. The downside is the initial amount of heat generated. A 90 second cooking time will require at least ten seconds of cool blowing for the cereal to be edible without a trip to the burn center.

So even though it loses a bowl for possibility to cause bodily harm and a bowl for dehydrated apple slices, that when hydrated just taste watery, it’s a pretty good quick and easy alternative that can be supplemented with additives of your choice such as raisins or brown sugar.

Out of curiosity, what’s your favorite oatmeal?

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about the cereal please visit Quaker Oatmeal’s website.

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What is there for me to say about the cereal of choice for Goldilocks and those pesky Three Bears? There really isn’t that much except that it was pretty damn good with some raisins and brown sugar. Now why don’t they mention THAT in the kid’s story??? It’s always too hot or too cold or just right. You never hear about it being too bland or too sweet or too plump with raisins. Trying to keep it simple with kids is not necessarily wise… opening their minds to possibilities is what books like this should be doing.

The truth is that this “porridge” tasted more like oatmeal. Now normally porridge is made of crushed oats as opposed to actual oatmeal, but it’s still acceptable according to Wikipedia. So if Wikipedia says its okay, then it must be, right? Sure. So this “porridge” was good mixed with about a tablespoon of brown sugar and two tablespoons of raisins. You can put any variety of fruit or nuts into the porridge to liven it up, but in the end its still going to have that oat base taste.

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

You can visit Mike at Lesombre.ca … he’s Canadian… eh.