Cereal Club – Krave

What I liked initially about Krave was it’s marketing campaign, for the first time in a long time a cereal was being unashamedly marketed as being good tasting and not much else. In these times of health conscious mothers it’s rare to find such a thing even in the kiddy cereal aisle where Kellogg’s are hell bent on ruining old classics such as Coco Pops by adding healthful varieties to the range such as the thoroughly disgusting looking choco rolls and coco pops rocks. Eating Coco Pops for the benefit of your health is as silly as going to McDonalds and ordering a salad. No, healthy and kiddy cereal just don’t go hand in hand and that’s part of the joy of getting them. As a kid Cornflakes and Rice Krispies were cupboard staples and Frosties and Coco Pops appeared on special occasions, their rarity was what made them special and adding healthy grains reduces them to level of the common cereal. My fear is that all the wacky cereal characters will one day be wearing t-shirts emblazoned with words like ‘multigrain’ and ‘fiber’, only to eventually be abolished leaving only the text and some hideous aspartame loaded grain infused carob cereal inside. At least Krave is going some way to appease my concern

Halloween Candy – scary but not so tasty

I want to love Halloween, I really do. I love horror movies and have since I was a kid watching Hammer movies at 2 in the morning and developing an unhealthy lifelong love of the genre. Halloween is effectively the embodiment of these types of films, people dress up in ghoulish costumes and do their best to look scary. It should suit me down to the ground, so why don’t I like it? That’s genuinely a rhetorical question, I can’t fathom it myself. Perhaps it’s the lack of tradition surrounding the holiday, now it’s more costumes and going to themed nightclub parties and less bonfires and dark and mysterious rituals. Want to be scared? bob for apples, its extremely difficult and resembles something that I imagine to be similar to waterboarding. All that aside, its time to talk about what food we eat at Halloween. This is meant to be a food blog after all.

Cereal Club: Golden Grahams – Not eating these would be a graham-atical error!

I feel like a child, it’s saturday morning, I awoke early and poured myself a large bowl of sugary cereal and sat in my trackies watching TV (not cartoons, as much as I’d like to like them I just can’t anymore). This Saturday I’ve been reunited with an old friend, Golden Grahams. When I was a kid they were taken off the shelf (I was devastated) and have only reappeared in recent years. Perhaps it was a fear of being hurt again that has made me hesitant to quickly return. Well, they’re back and it looks like they’re back for good. Huzzah!

Fast Food – McDonalds 1955 Burger

Image courtesy of Burger Business

Firstly I must admit that I’m a fast food junkie. If I could eat burgers, pizza, tacos, kebabs etc. everyday I would live a not so full but certainly a happy life. When I was younger there was no local megachain so I looked forward to bi-annual trips to Dublin where we’d stop at the drive thru on the way into the city. The drive was always my favourite part of the trip. To this day I always stop at McDonald’s at the airport when leaving Dublin (those bastards snuck a Burger King into the new Terminal 2 but I guess it’ll have to do despite the fries). So when McDonald’s announced recently they were launching their 1955 burger in Ireland I was understandably excited.

Rice Krispie Squares

Rice Krispie Squares; chewy, gooey, and likely to relieve you of your fillings. I’ve had a grudge against the rice krispie square for over a decade now due to its rock-solid-stickier-than-fly-paper texture and its sickly sweet taste. But not all rice krispie squares are created equal as I recently discovered upon chowing down on some sweet treats courtesy of my sister. When I first tasted them I thought they were delicious but knew I’d have to make them again myself at a later date when I was in a more impartial mood because (a) I’d been drinking, and (b) I hadn’t had any dinner and would have eaten my own hands. The result of my efforts was still very tasty although I did make the mistake of using kerrygold – the butteriest butter in all the land – and so each square had a slight aftertaste of heart attack. I should point out however that this didn’t put me off devouring them.

Hats Off!

Back when I was growing up the Marshmallow Top Hat was a staple of every party spread. A simple marshmallow pressed into a generous bed of chocolate with a colourful smartie placed on top had the power to drive children into a frenzy. It was a simpler time, a time when rain during the summer months was few and far between, and the biggest worry you had was what flavour soap from the Body Shop to get your friend for their birthday. There was a party on every other Saturday and you never had to worry about waking up on a Sunday morning with a dreaded case of the horrors. Life was indeed good.