Tag: cereal

cereal: it’s what’s for dinner

Menu
Alejna’s Busy Day Bistro

Appetizers

Corn on the Couch
A paper bag filled with freshly popped kernels of corn. Skillfully microwaved, and usually not burned. Available with butter-like flavor or “natural” flavoring. Served on the sofa.

Lowering the Bar
A protein bar, grabbed out of cabinet. Eaten while driving to catch the train, or while otherwise multi-tasking. Hasty unwrapping leads to bits of chocolatey coating to be found stuck to clothing, providing a treat for later.

Entrées

Early Bird’s Special K
A bowl of cereal, eaten at the kitchen table.

Life is a Bowl of Cheerios
A bowl of cereal, eaten while standing in the kitchen.

Variety of Life
A bowl of cereal, regular or cinnamon flavored, eaten while sitting on the kitchen floor.

Multi-grain Pillows
A bowl of cereal, eaten while slouched on the sofa cushions.

Chef’s Gourmet Specials Tired

Cheddar Broccoli Pot Pie
Tender broccoli, carrots and potatoes in a rich, savory cheese sauce baked in a hearty whole wheat crust. Baked Fresh Daily.Purchased from grocery store, removed from freezer. Box opened, pie microwaved on high for 5 minutes.

Harvest Medley
Portobello mushrooms, sundried tomatoes and fresh asparagus in a garlic cream sauce a box of crackers served on a bed of house-made linguini, and garnished with micro arugula.

Napoleon de Goober
Alternating layers of sliced bread, ground peanut spread, and orchard fruit preserves. Cut in half and served with a fresh fruit garnish.

Desserts

October’s Bounty
A bag of miniature chocolate bars, purchased in advance for Halloween, hidden carefully at the back of the cabinets behind the dried beans. Eaten 1 or 2 3 or 4 at a time throughout the day, bag replaced in hiding place. Repeated until bag is empty.

Frozen Guilt
Pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. Half-cup serving size presented in bowl, and served at dining room table. Once this is finished, the rest of the pint is eaten directly out of the container while sitting on the couch.

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This week’s Monday Mission placed orders for posts written in the form of a menu. Please note that I don’t always eat this way. But, well, there are days when the farm-fresh vegetables stay in the refrigerator.

berry me deep

jamberry.jpgOur blueberry-picking excursion of the weekend has me thinking about berries. Mmmmmm, berries.

I love berries. And so do lots of other people. Berries show up in muffins, pies and other baked goods. Also in lots of books and folktales, and few songs. Plus a few other places you wouldn’t expect to find berries. Which is how berries ended up in my list of themed things.

  • Jamberry, by Bruce Degen
    A book of a bear, a boy, and many, many berries. Blueberries, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries. And silly rhymes.

    Quickberry, quackberry
    Pick me a blackberrry

  • Blueberries for Sal, by Robert McCloskey
    A picturebook of berry-picking and bears, and mistaken identity.
  • Blueberry. The name of my stuffed bear I got from my mother for my fourth birthday. I still have him.
  • Violet, the gum-chewer of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the book by Roald Dahl, and the movies based on it) turns into a giant blueberry.

    • blueberry_crop.jpg

  • Firefly & Buffy. Maybe Joss Whedon has a thing for strawberries. In Firefly, strawberries are a luxury item and valued commodity. A box of strawberries is what Book uses to convince Kaylee to take him on as a passenger in the pilot episode. In the Buffy Season 6 episode “Wrecked,” the creepy Rack tells Willow “you taste like strawberries.” (I also feel like there was a scene in the bronze at some point where some random dancing person gets briefly turned into a giant strawberry. Am I imagining this?)

    • strawberrywatercolor.jpg

  • Strawberry Shortcake. The doll. The cartoons. The empire. I still remember the commercials for the doll from when I was little. I can still hear the song, with it’s mockable swellness:

    Strawberry Shortcake
    My she’s looking swell!
    Cute little doll
    With a strawberry smell.

  • The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry and the Big Hungry Bear, by Don Wood Another picture book. About a mouse. And a strawberry. Also some mention of a bear.
  • The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher, by Molly Bang. I don’t actually know this berry-oriented book, though it won a Caldecott Honor medal. I liked the author’s story of struggling to get it published.
  • The Strawberry Legend. A Cherokee Legend where a woman forgets her anger and remembers her love as she eats some berries. (There’s at least one book version, too.)
  • The Blackberry Bush, a folktale in the book Stories to Tell to Children by Sara Cone Bryant.
  • Blackberry . One of the rabbits from Watership Down, by Douglas Adams.
  • BlackBerry. An electronic device. John had one for a couple of years. He would sometimes throw it when he got email because it would irritate him so much with its onslaught of interruptions.
  • Blowing a raspberry. Okay, it has nothing to do with berries. It’s when you make a sort of continous spitting noise by sticking your tongue between your lips and blowing, or by blowing through loosely closed lips. I have no idea why it’s called a raspberry.
  • Knott’s Berry Farm. Not actually a farm, and not so much berry-ish. It’s a large amusement park. But the founder did sell berries.
  • Frankenberry. A cereal. Berry-flavored. Also a cartoon character from the cereal box and commercials. Has a bit of a cult following. (There also seem to be some other meanings to Frankenberry, as seen on Urban Dictionary, but they seem pretty lame to me.)
  • Finally, here are a few berry songs that I picked for you:
    • Raspberry Beret, Prince (Okay, not really about raspberries)
    • Blueberry Hill, Louis Armstrong (Not really about blueberries)
    • Strawberry Fields Forever, the Beatles (…nothing is real…)

      • blueberries_2.pngraspberry_sm.pngblackberries_orig.pngstrawberries.png

    • extra cheese

    You know what really cheeses me off? When I finish a list and realize I’ve forgotten something.

    It’s like going to the grocery store to buy bread, eggs and milk, and then remembering I need cheese too as I’m driving on my way there, but I figure I’ll wait to add it to my list, since it would be hazardous to write while driving, even if it is only one word, and then when I get there, going into this trance as I wander the aisles with my shopping cart, and wondering what it means that supermarkets now play music that was actually popular when I was in high school, and feeling up the melons and squeezing the toilet paper, then browsing the cereal aisle and feeling nostalgic for the days of my youth when lucky charms were an exotic unattainable bowl of cereal at the end of the rainbow because my mother insisted on having us eat healthy cereals like wheat chex and when I finally tried them, they really weren’t that thrilling, and resisting the urge to buy cookies and redi-whip and donuts, and before you know it, I’ve filled up the cart and then I head home with my bags of groceries, and after I put away my bread and my milk and my pint of organic blackberry sorbet, which seemed like a healthier choice than the chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, but screw it, I bought that too, and bananas and maple syrup and zucchini and oatmeal and frozen peas, and then find a crumpled up paper in my pocket, and it’s my grocery list with its three measly items (bread, eggs and milk) scribbled on it, and realize that I’ve forgotten the eggs, and (crap!) I also forgot to get more cheese.

    You know what I’m saying?

    Anyhow, I realized that I left off some key pieces of cheese from yesterday’s cheeseful bounty. Such as:

    1. Richard Cheese, a musician who, along with his band Lounge Against the Machine, provides cheesy lounge music reinterpretations of so many your favorite contemporary songs. Also in the music category is the band The String Cheese Incident. Then there’s the apparently sadly now-defunct Cheese Patrol, a

      yearly homage to all the songs that people vociferously hate but secretly know all the words to. These are the songs we grew up with; overorchestrated. overwrought, oversynthed, over the top.

    2. Somehow I also managed to leave off the appearance of the cheese guy in the Buffy episode “Restless“, as well as a few other cheesy references. And in my research I came across this brilliant essay “An Analysis of Cheese as Metaphor in Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. Apparently, the layers of cheese in the Buffy series run far deeper than I’d realized.
    3. For more on cheese philosophy, you can check out this essay “on the non-existence of cheese.” Is there proof of the existence of cheese in the universe? Perhaps not.
    4. Then there’s the Cheese Burglar. But I’m not really a big fan of the cult of which he is a member. So instead I offer this cartoon mouse classic, The Cheese Burglar (1946). (You can even see it on YouTube. Though I admit to not having watched anything close to the whole 7 minutes.)
    5. I actually like the animation of this (shorter) shortThe Cheese Trap better, which features a cg version of the board game Mouse Trap, one of my childhood favorites.
    6. Do you hanker for a hunka cheese? Do you remember this rather creepy cartoon psa from the 70s? You might also be interested in the hunk-hankerers guest appearance on the Family Guy.
    7. Yesterday’s cheese did not include much in the way of cheese activities for those of you with too much time and not enough cheese on your hands. Options include: a quiz to let you know what kind of cheese you are. (There’s also a similar-veined one-step cheese “comparator,” but the reviews are not stellar.)
    8. There’s even an experiment with cheese that you can perform at home on your own. (However, the author does recommend exercising caution if you are lactose tolerant.) (And no, my dear seester, this is not the same cheese experiment you tried with me that one time when we were little. I’ll write about that later.)
    9. Most thrillingly, you can actually watch cheese *live* online. That’s right, you can watch watch cheddar cheese aging. Not only is it just as exciting as it sounds, it is also apparently the cool thing to do. (If you don’t have the months to spare to see the change in progress, you can also check out this time-lapse video encapsulating 3 months of the cheese-aging process.)
    10. And even though I offered it up yesterday, no cheese list would be complete without The Cheese Shop sketch. This time, I serve it up in its youtubiful glory:

    crispy flakes of wisdom and crunchy nuggets of knowledge

    One of the prize books in my collection is a book by none other than J. H. Kellogg, M.D. Yes, of corn flakes fame. Many have heard of this notable personage from the book The Road to Wellville by T. C. Boyle (and movie based on the same).

    I stumbled across this book while browsing in a used book store in East Lansing, Michigan. (I was there for Linguistics Summer Camp.) Having heard of Kellogg, I was intrigued. And with a title like Plain Facts, and a publication date of 1882, I had to see what it was about. I opened the book to a page at random. And laughed out loud. I flipped through more pages, and laughed again. (snort, snicker…) I had to buy the book before I was thrown out.

    It turns out that the “plain facts” are all about sex. As written by someone who felt that sex should be avoided whenever possible.

    I don’t remember what the first passage I read was. But the beauty of this book is that nearly every page offers some piece of wisdom that I just couldn’t make up. I must share it with the world at large.

    For example, we learn from page 87 that young women must not get their feet wet at certain times of the month, or they may do permanent damage:

    A young lady who allows herself to get wet or chilled, or gets the feet wet, just prior to or during menstruation, runs the risk of imposing upon herself life-long injury.

    Even babies may be in danger from the “stamp of vice,” as we learn from page 183:

    Sometimes–rarely we hope–the helpless infant imbibes the essence of libidinous desires with its mother’s milk, and thence receives upon its forming brain the stamp of vice.

    And not to leave out the dangers to men, there’s page 366, which offers this dire warning about the perils of auto-eroticism:

    Many young men waste away and die of symptoms resembling consumption which are solely the result of the loathsome practice of self-abuse.

    So I offer to you a game. Please give me a random (or carefully selected by whatever means you like) number between 1 and 512, and I will attempt to locate some notable nugget of wisdom for you in the vicinity of that page.

    [Note: I’ll get back with the nuggets for you next Tuesday, April 10th.]