Tag Archives: oatmeal

Review: Ideal Oats Oatmeal – 3 Flavors!

Look, oatmeal is no one’s idea of ideal.

Sure, it’s healthy, wholesome, warm, nourishing, and all that jazz, but it’s also ugly. Those moist, lumpy, and occasional drippy beige chunks? Second only to canned tuna on my list of “tasty foods I’d swipe left on if Betty Crocker made a dating app.”

That’s why I’m giving props to Ideal Oats for trying to glamorize, or at least revolutionize, the classic breakfast with a face for radio. Billed as “Oatmeal, Reinvented,” Ideal Oats not only aims to help the fitness-conscious with 20g of protein per, but it also aims to overthrow the oatmeal aisle oligopoly of Apple Cinnamon and Maple Brown Sugar by bringing in never-before-seen flavors.

Needless to say, as someone whose recent exercise log primarily consists of long walks to the back of the grocery store to buy more Reese’s Cup coffee creamer, it’s the flavors that make most excited for this review.

All three cups featured below were sent to me by Ideal Oats, but I promise the freeness of the oats won’t influence my review. When it comes to peanut butter and bananas, I don’t lie: not after the infamous “Mario Kart PB&J Incident of 2008.”

I’m still finding tear-stained crumbs in my carpet. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Uncategorized. Tags: 7 rating, 8 rating, apple, banana, cinnamon, oatmeal, peanut butter. 3 Comments

Dec. ’17

Review: Quaker Gingerbread Spice Oatmeal

By this point, my obsession with gingerbread is well documented on this site—and probably by the Library of Congress, too.

So I’m not going to start this review of Quaker’s new Gingerbread Oatmeal (just one arm of their 2017 gingerbread menagerie, which also includes a cereal) by clobbering you over the head with my love for cloves, ginger, and molasses-y dough. Instead, I’ll segue in by briefly obsessing over my other favorite winter flavor: eggnog. In short…it’s great!

This delightfully spiced custardy concoction is coziness distilled, and now that my bucket list is one gingerbread cereal shorter, my new “dream cereal” has to be an eggnog one—preferably of the Toast Crunch variety—if only so that I can pour eggnog on my crunchy eggnog cereal and feel as giddy as a kid watching a G.I. Christmas Special on a Saturday morning Christmas Eve.

Or maybe that’ll just be the rum talking. Whatever: oatmeal time! Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 7 rating, gingerbread, holiday, oatmeal, quaker. 5 Comments

Sep. ’17

Review: Quaker Green Apple Fig Oatmeal with Antioxidants

“Aw, I gotta play with that guy??” Green Apple whines. “But Mom, he’s totally uncool! Fig always gets picked last when we play fruitball—a total poindexter.”

Yes, I imagine figs as the unpopular kid in the brutal playground hierarchy of the personified fruit world. I mean, fig has what: fancy mostarda and some under-celebrated cookies named after the inventor of calculus? I don’t blame you, Green Apple: if Momma Quaker forced me to go on a playdate with Fig, I’d turn sour too.

Yet here we are anyway: about to dive into a steaming bowl of Quaker’s newest instant oatmeal flavor: Green Apple Fig. If you’re wondering why I’m using so many colons in this review, the answer’s simple: with 4 grams of fiber and enough infused antioxidants to take a true crime TV channel off the air, this Green Apple Fig oatmeal is all about the colon.

And now that we’ve gotten my token crude joke out of the way, let’s dig in! Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 5 rating, apple, non cereal, oatmeal, quaker. 3 Comments

Jul. ’17

Review: Quaker Overnight Oats – Toasted Coconut & Almond Crunch

Is it just me, or has the humble coconut been having a quietly nutty couple years in the breakfast aisle?

Before 2016, we rarely saw the milk-stuffed tropical sphere appear at breakfast time—unless we watched Monty Python’s Holy Grail while eating our Saturday morning munchies—but now it seems like every Girl Scout, superfood, and massive anthropomorphized consonant is paying homage to the fruit with translucent slivers of coconutty love. I can’t say for certain just why there’s been a coconut resurgence. Perhaps it’s piggybacking off the coconut oil fad, but I like to believe it’s because Super Mario Sunshine’s 15th anniversary is next month.

Regardless, it unfortunately doesn’t feel like any recent coconut breakfast food really nails the coconut experience—Nature’s Path’s latest Love Crunch flavor comes closest, but even then, the dark chocolate is the star of the show.

I know what you’re probably thinking: “Oh, since this is his introduction to a Toasted Coconut & Almond Crunch Overnight Oats review, that must mean this new Quaker product finally breaks the ‘weak coconut streak’ like a cracked coconut over a marooned cartoon islander’s head!”

Wrong. Sorry to break the bad news, like a cracked coconut broken over a…you know…but this second flavor of Quaker Overnight Oats I’ve tried (after the borderline heavenly Raisin Walnut & Honey Heaven) doesn’t get coconut right, either. But what it does get right is that other nut in its name. Boy, does it ever. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 7 rating, almond, coconut, non cereal, oatmeal, quaker. 4 Comments

Jul. ’17

Review: Quaker Overnight Oats – Raisin Walnut & Honey Heaven

I don’t remember learning about Raisin Walnut & Honey Heaven in Sunday school. Is that where young folks who like to eat breakfast like senior citizens go when they die? If so, the whatever higher power is up there can hurry up and smite me, because there’s nothing I secretly love more than eating bowls full of fibrous cereal and grapes that got the shrunken head treatment.

Hey, something’s gotta balance out all the Cinnamon Toast Crunch I eat, um, for science.

Yes, Raisin Walnut & Honey Heaven was my natural first choice when presented with Quaker’s four new Overnight Oat flavors. The little cups of oats, which you’re supposed to pour milk on and refrigerate for 6+ hours before eating (my condolences to the world’s insomniacs), also come in Toasted Coconut & Almond Crunch, Blueberry Banana & Vanilla Bliss, and Orchard Peach Pecan Perfection.

Why each flavor sounds so euphoric and zen, I don’t know, but I do know I’ll now forever picture the Quaker Oat guy’s face on the Buddha’s plumply smiling body. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 8 rating, non cereal, oatmeal, quaker, raisin. 4 Comments

Jun. ’17

News: New Quaker Product Oat-stravaganza

Oh come on, Quaker: give that poor ol’ Oats guy a rest. We all know that he has to hand-toast every single Quaker oat before it’s ready for consumption. It takes him hours just to meticulously craft a single oatmeal packet, and now you’re throwing a smorgasbord of new products onto his to-do list! His work–life balance is going out the window, all for the sake of our balanced breakfast.

Oh well, he’s a man who loves his craft, so let’s respect it by rounding up all the new Quaker products hitting shelves now. Above we have an extension of the brand’s iconic instant oatmeal pantheon: two antioxidant-rich varieties. I don’t know much about antioxidants—my childish self would assume you throw the packets in a room ful of your enemies to slowly drain them of oxygen, supervillain-style—but I know that the two flavors here are pretty unique. Blueberry Cranberry is bold for brazenly removing strawberry from the expected berry rotation, while Green Apple Fig is the first fig flavored anything I’ve heard of since the Fig Newton.

(I really hope this oatmeal contains crushed-up Fig Newtons.) Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: News. Tags: oatmeal, quaker. 1 Comment

May. ’17

Review: Cinnamon Toast Crunch Oatmeal (Canada)

Can you see why kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch Instant Oatmeal—or as some call it in Canada: “Croque Cannele Gruau Instantané?”

Of course: it’s got cinnamon sugar amorphous globs in every bite! It’s the taste you can see…still sticking to your ceiling three weeks later if you fling it hard enough.

Wait, wait—that’s the oatmeal’s old slogan. The new one is much better: crave those crazy hot oat lumps!

Fine, I give up. There’s no real appetizing catchphrase for Canada’s second new cereal-oatmeal hybrid. And even if there was, a burnt sienna bowl of microwaved roses by any other name would taste just as sweet. Or in the case of Cinnamon Toast Crunch Oatmeal, just as bland and disappointing. I know I usually leave my opinion out of each review’s introduction, but I couldn’t resist spoiling my spoiled breakfast from the get-go. This oatmeal has a host of toasty problems, so let’s work backwards and try sourcing its flaws like a paleontologist doing CSI on a pile of raptor skeletons. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 4 rating, canada, cinnamon, general mills, oatmeal, toast crunch. 2 Comments

May. ’17

Review: Lucky Charms Oatmeal (Canada)

This may not be canon, but I believe General Mills’ new Canada-only Lucky Charms Oatmeal is from an alternate timeline in the cereal universe.

In this truly darkest timeline, those cartoon kids who cheerfully steal Lucky the Leprechaun’s sugary breakfast aren’t motivated by hunger or anything rational. No, these serial cereal sociopaths take Lucky’s marshmallowy horseshoes and shooting stars just so they can melt them before his eyes in a bowl of bubbling, magmatic oats.

In this somber universe, Lucky Charms are “masochistically delicious!”

Somehow, those bullies’ mealy instruments of destruction crossed through an inter-dimensional portal and landed on Canadian grocery shelves. It’s the only logical explanation for the grotesque scenes of marshmallowy immolation you’re about to witness. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 6 rating, general mills, lucky charms, marshmallows, oatmeal. 3 Comments