A cereal review

Kellogg's Fibre Plus Cereal Review

Two words. It's awful. Save your money. I received a free sample of this cereal in the mail recently. I requested it online and decided to try it today. I tried the Harvest Brown Sugar Flavour. I added my skim milk (as is my practice when eating the tried and true Honey Nut Cheerios) and dug in.

Big mistake.

In hindsight, what I should have done was to shred the cereal box and try that with milk. I probably would have been less annoyed at the ruined milk if I knew in advance the risk involved in pouring it in the bowl.

Sunny Jim, The Beabull

It was flavour-less and had an odd texture. There was almost none of the advertised clusters of granola, just pellets with a strong resemblance to Puppy Chow. And I don't know anyone (aside from Sunny Jim, that is) who has any interest in puppy chow for breakfast.

I won't be using the $2 and $1 off coupon that was included with the cereal sample. My family of serious cereal eaters won't go anywhere near this one. Oh well.

On my Peach ranking scale, Kellogg's Fibre Plus Cereal tanks - 1 Peach out of a possible 5 Peaches (if I could rate it lower, I would, believe me)

Flourless Chocolate Cake and a Water Update

Flourless Chocolate Cake.  It doesn't sound right, but what if it is?  It may have definite possibilities, combining two of my favourite things (chocolate and cake, of course) but leaving out that, which we now know is evil - Flour.  So many of us, for so many years, cowered from sugar, fat, red meat (of course, cowering did not stop the gluttonish over-indulgence of these staples of the North American diet, just made us feel worse about doing it) and now, NOW, we find out that Flour is likely the downfall of civilization as we know it.

So, armed with this new knowledge and the sheer determination to postpone the aforementioned downfall, I set out to figure out how to quell the screaming in my head for chocolate (and for cake!) but not subject my toxin-ridden, Flour-filled body with more of that sheep-in-a-wolf's-clothes substance, Flour.  And I did it.

To be honest, if was a no-brainer.  Nicole, at Baking Bites, one of my FAVOURITE (Canadian spelling much, eh?) baking blogs posted this recipe for Flourless Chocolate Cake, and to my delight, I had all five ingredients so quickly threw them together and the result is currently baking away in my oven (during high peak time-of-use electricity hours, no less!).  It had better be worth the higher priced kilo-watts!  I'll keep you posted.

WATER.

While I remain on unfriendly terms with this fluid, the basement is on the way to drying out.  The dehumidifier that we rented wasn't really up to the task, so we're trying to get another one tonight.  In the meantime, the little dehumidifier and fans are going strong. 

I sure was happy to wake up this morning to rain - that's the best ever.  Blech.

Well, I have to run, the oven timer is dinging.  My blood sugar is low and my hopes are high.

Water. Lots of Water

So, you may be thinking 'Oh, jayzus, not ANOTHER person blathering on about the benefits of drinking water - I won't read it, I can't stand it!  Now where is my Diet Pepsi?'  Well, don't despair.  I'm not going to tell you to drink water.  Right now, I am not a fan of water.  At all.  In fact, right now, I am cursing water from the depths of my being and if there was a replacement for it (dishes, showers, laundry), I'd be signing on the dotted line.

Why?

Because of the inches and inches of it that are currently in my basement.Baby toys floating by the washing machine, cardboard boxes of stuff I was going to sort through 'later,' Chipboard/formica/Ikea furniture acting like sponges and absorbing the wet.  Water.  Soaking the carpets, ruining the furniture, mocking me with it's icy cold misery.  Yup.  Sump pump failures suck. 

So, what do I do?  I place the 9-11 call to my husband, who is on his way to work, battling traffic on the 400, and tell him "Honey, the basement is flooded." After some discussion on the severity of the situation, he decides to turn around, come home and help slay the flood monster.

And?

Well, right now, he is on his way to rent dehumidifiers, a carpet cleaner, and please God, if there is any justice, he'll bring me a sour cream glazed donut.  My head hurts, my feet are cold, and I'm decending nicely into a pity party.  A donut right now would help immensely.  Really.  It would.

Life.

Life. Such as it is, keeps moving forward and burying me in details, burying me in the mundane, routine, bland details that fall under the category No One Except Me Gives a Second Thought To.  A big part of me wants to blame Life for that, but the bigger part of me (and um, no, that's not my thighs, thank you very much!) knows that only I can steer this unwieldy beast, I have thus far so unimaginatively called, My Life.

So. Back to Life.  I figure that it's time to take back control of all aspects of this, My Life, and beat it into the size, shape, configuration, flavour and aesthetic of my choosing.  No small feat, to be sure.

Whew. I'm exhausted already.  But, my all of kids are still up and running amok so no naps for me just yet.  I really wish they would stop stuffing lego up each other's noses.  It's really starting to gross me out.

Anyway...

As with everything else I decide to tackle (days, kids, tasks, chocolate, relationships, jobs, food, errant, arrogant drivers who use the HOV lanes while driving solo and talking on the phone) there needs to be a method to my madness and the best (and entirely legal) method I have is to make a list. At least one list every, single day. And many lists to cover off the Bigger parts of My Life.

Refining any of my lists is a chore unto itself, but maybe posting them for the world to see will make me accountable for checking things off my lists and not merely moving the item over to a new list. And yes, I check things off - I hate crossing things off my list - it would appear that crossing something off ruins the whole relationship I have with that list and makes me look at it like it's a lover whom I just found on my kitchen table, naked, with the meter reader - but that's another story for another time, I suppose.