A cow says: Moo

This is where I pick up that small thread from the previous post where I mentioned that we bought milk in India. To say that it was milk is a stretch. I only wrote that because it was easier than going off on the tangent that am now going off on.

Here in NY, we usually eat our cereal with soy milk or my new favorite: Eden Blend--a mix of soy and rice milk that is creamy and kind of sweet (so you have to choose a cereal carefully) but so delicious. At Nilgiris, our local Indian supermarket, we maybe naively searched for the same. Oh! But maybe it wasn't so naive!! Aha! There next to the guava juice... we saw it. Soy milk. Flavored soy milk. Apple, Mango, Coffee, Strawberry, and Chocolate flavored soy milk. GROSS.

Chocolate actually is okay on it's own but for cereal? Actually, it can be okay for the right cereal. It just wasn't what we were looking for. You know that feeling of disappointment? That was what we felt.

We were going to settle and buy real milk but as it turns out, the cow's milk came packaged in plastic bags and was not refrigerated. It's as if Nestle (the makers) had all these preservatives left over from whenever the FDA decided it was not cool to make everything we consume radioactive and decided to just add them to the milk they sell in India. Nestle also makes a powdered version that doesn't actually say it is milk anywhere on the package. It is called "dairy whitener". WTF?

However, there was also a box of powdered (dehydrated?) soy milk. This is what we chose to purchase and then mix with bottled water to make "milk" for our cereal. The result was a kind of grainy whitish liquid with a faint taste of soy to it, but we were just so excited to have cereal at all that our biggest complaint was the temperature.

"Everything in this bowl is exactly room temperature."--observation by K

It turns out, that it makes a BIG difference. As time went on we did end up finding regular soy milk but only in juice-box-sized boxes.

TII as they say. This is India.

It's a Coconut, get it?

In honor of our return from India... Oh, did we not mention that? Yeah, we were backpacking in India and now we're back!

In honor of our return, I thought I'd bring up a NEW CEREAL discovery that we made there. For our first month we did not have cereal at all. We had prepared for this by eating a lot of cereal in LA before leaving and reminding ourselves of this inevitability with every appreciated bite. We did not expect to eat cereal there at all until one day we found ourselves with an apartment and a grocery store nearby with........ a cereal aisle. So we made the obvious decision to buy two kinds of cereal and milk. (more on the milk later) Muesli for the mornings was healthy and good. And for the evening times: Chocos.

Now, weirdly enough I have not been able to find a picture of a Chocos box via google. The ones coming up have a bear as a mascot but ours had a monkey. WTF kellogs? However, for added awesomeness here is a picture of a cat under an authentic Chocos box.
Chocos are chocolate flavored, like much cereal in India, and fall somewhere between a flake and a puff. A smooshed puff. They are all shaped the same and three of them together make a coconut shape!

The best way to eat chocos is dry, with a Mysore Mangler (Hercules rum + guava juice), on a movie night.
Perfection. I am Zac Efron, and I endorse this blog post.*





*Disclaimer: I am not Zac Efron, but I do endorse this blog post.

Cereal as Dessert

I know that the validity of certain cereals as such has been questioned previously on this blog, but I would like to address the role of cereal as dessert. Actually that seems too ambitious and I will stick to an anecdote for the time being:

I am currently residing in a dorm room in Maine and eating in a college cafeteria where I am overwhelmed by the number of choices but lack of flavor. Usually they have several options for dessert. Vegan cookies, cake, brownies, pies, etc. are the norm and then there is the frozen yogurt. Yesterday, however, we were down to chocolate cheesecake brownies with mint chips (way too much going on) and a vegan pie/crumble thing that was hardly appealing. And jello. So I turned to the good old standby: cereal.

They offer over 40 varieties of cereal at this college, but yesterday my path was clear. Cocoa Puffs + Reeses Peanut Butter Puffs + EdenSoy Milk + bananas. It was amazing. Each crunch seemed to release a medley of flavors and because the puffs were comparable in appearance, there was an added element of surprise. Would this bite be chocolatey? Peanut buttery? A little of both? Delicious.

Cereal Song

It has been pointed out more than once that things have been quiet around here, and there are several reasons for that. For one, we are on a break from cereal. Not to worry, it is only a short break and we'll be back in business in another 2 days! In the meantime, here are some other friends of cereal who are holding the fort down.


Indian Cereal

this morning was just fine

Introducing: Cereal Sightings

A new segment in which cereal sightings will be pointed out. In this edition, one more reason to love HSM: cereal makes it into the final script. Yessssss.

Chad: Look, you're a hoops dude. Not a musical singer person. Have you ever seen Michael Crawford on a cereal box?
Troy Bolton: Who's Michael Crawford?
Chad: Exactly my point. He was the "Phantom of the Opera" on Broadway. Now my mom, she's seen that musical 27 times and she put Michael Crawford's picture in our refrigerator. Not on it. IN it. So my point is, if you play basketball, you'll end up on the cereal box. If you sing in musicals, you'll end up in my mom's refrigerator.

a new day!

The time has come, friends...

I'm out of cereal, and you know what that means.

NEW CEREAL ALERT!!

I really have been loving on the honey bunches of oats. I've also been thinking about more simple cereals that I've kind of forgotten about: grape nuts, rice krispies, kix, special k. Maybe a grape nuts base with honey bunches of oats. gotta get some bananas, too.

Help me out! What should I go for next?