Monthly Archive for March, 2007

Breakfast Cereal Roundup

Published
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chrisandcamri
on March 29, 2007
in Food
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Tulip gets close to the cereal.

Tulip gets close to the cereal.

We’re fans of breakfast. As much as we’d like to have eggs and pancakes every morning, we don’t have time, and we don’t want to weigh 500 pounds. So, for practical reasons, we mostly stick to toast, or oatmeal, or yogurt and muesli. About half the time, we eat cold cereal and milk. Which isn’t as unhip as it used to be, given that we recently paid $5 for a bowl of cereal at a cereal-boutique in Evanston. What follows is a run down of our favorite breakfast cereals. Most fall into the super-crunchy-healthy category, but there’s also some sugary good stuff in there as well.

Milk

A quick word about milk, a year or so ago we switched to organic milk, and we’ve never looked back. It’s richer, more milky flavored, and better for you. We encourage you to try out whatever brand of organic milk you can try. We like it. As a double-aside, Camri barely puts any milk on her cereal, I drown mine. I like having a glass of milk in the bowl when I’m done. Then the kittens get to lick the milk residue off the side of the bowl. When I have cereal, everyone gets a little treat. Now, on to the cereals.

Organic Optimum Power Breakfast with Flax Soy and Blueberry

That’s some title, eh? If you’re thinking, “this stuff probably looks like twigs,” you’re right. It totally looks like twigs. To an extent, it also tastes like twigs, except with berries. It’s good. It gets a ten on the crunchy fiber scale. Be forewarned, if you’re not big into fiber, and you have a big bowl of this stuff, you might…uh…not want to make any plans. It’s going to clean you out. Optimum. Power.

Quaker Essentials Oatmeal Squares

This is Camri’s favorite. The Quaker Oats man decided to make little cinnamon squares. He’s good at it. They taste great, have a nice crunch, and don’t get soggy in milk. However, they’re sort of deceptive, they’re not really as good for you as you’d think. If you stacked them up against a sugar cereal, like…say…fruity pebbles, you might be surprised that they’re not that far apart in terms of fiber, calories and fat. Which leads us to…

Fruity Pebbles

Early in our relationship, we had the inevitable, “what was your favorite breakfast cereal when you were a kid” discussion. It’s a tense time in any relationship. What if she liked something dumb like Lucky Charms? What if he was only allowed to have Grape Nuts? It turns out, we both picked Fruity Pebbles as our number one kids cereal. It’s crazy good. Lots of color, absurdly sweet, makes your milk turn funny colors. Shockingly, it’s really not that bad for you. It has a good amount of fiber, is pretty low cal, and has a teeny bit of fat. Plus, it has wacky games on the box. Fruity Pebbles doesn’t stop at keeping your body fit; Fruity Pebbles exercises your mind. Plus, as far as we know, Fruity Pebbles is the first breakfast cereal to feature a rap as a jingle, “I’m the master rapper and I’m hear to say, I love Fruity Pebbles in a major way.”

Total Raisin Bran

It’s Raisin Bran, under the Total umbrella. You know what’s in raisin bran…raisins…bran. It’s good, it’s classic, why mess with it? I can’t tell the difference between it and every other raisin bran on the market, but Camri insists that Total is the best. It’s like the Mercedes of Raisin Bran. More sugar per raisin, more bran per flake. Give yourself a treat, make your raisin bran Total.

Frosted Mini Wheats, Big Bites

For whatever reason, we rarely hear about people eating the big bites. Everyone wants their mini wheats to be mini. Why? Live a little folks, get the big bites. They totally break the typical breakfast cereal mold. They’re huge, they’re covered in sugar, yet still manage to be pretty good for you. They’re my favorite 9pm cereal as well. Something about the big biscuits in milk, half coated in sugar, makes me think I’m eating dessert. Don’t get those strawberry mini wheats though, they’re terrible.

Stumped by Posole

Published
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chrisandcamri
on March 24, 2007
in Food
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Thursday night, Camri and I went to the opening of the Second City’s 94th revue, Between Barack and a Hard Place. Our friend Ithamar Enriquez is in the cast. During one of the improvised scenes, Ithamar got the suggestion of “Posole,” which kicked off a pretty funny song, and a couple of minutes of funny talk between Ithamar and Joe Canale. It’s funny because there’s no chance that Posole would have been the suggestion, except for on a opening night. Opening night audiences are typically more improv-savvy, so the suggestions aren’t the typical stuff. It was a funny scene.

It was doubly funny because Camri and I had been eating Posole all week, and had planned on writing this article. So, clearly, Posole is on everyone’s mind as of late. It’s a very popular stew in the Southwest US and Mexico that has it’s origins in pre-Columbian Mexico. Just like beef stew, or chili, there’s hundreds of variations in the recipe, but there’s a few typical bits that make it Posole: chunks of pork or chicken, hominy, and some sort of soup stock.

Our recipe went something like this, a pound of chicken, a cup of our homemade turkey stock, a can of hominy, a handful of chopped aromatic veggies, a can of diced tomatoes, and a small can of hot jalapeños. Throw it all in the crock pot on low for seven hours. Dish it up, add a slice of lime, and you’ve got a spicy stew that’s just exotic enough to make you feel like you’re on an adventure. Very good stuff.

For a more in depth history of the dish, check out the posole page on wikipedia.

Organic House Cleaning

Published
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chrisandcamri
on March 17, 2007
in Home
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Our cats like to lick stuff. It happens a lot. We’ll be eating breakfast, and one of them will lick the countertop for no obvious reason. It’s odd, strange, and makes us nervous. What are they licking? What did we use to clean the counter-top? Does it have something that tastes delicious but is actually poison?

Sometimes we drop our toothbrushes in the sink. Sometimes a plate isn’t as convenient as putting a slice of bread right on the table. Sometimes we might eat a piece of popcorn that fell on the floor. Are we eating little bits of poison each time we do this? Meh…maybe…a teeny bit. If nothing else, it made us think, “what’s in our cleaning products? Are they safe? Could we take a big swig of our laundry detergent?”

We take extra steps to try and eat organic fruits and veggies, so shouldn’t we do the same for our cleaning products? We started by buying the book, Organic Housekeeping by Ellen Sandbeck. The book is excellent, thick, and full of good advice. It convinced us that it was important to try and buy cleaning products that were less harmful to our guts than typical stuff.

This all happened about a year and a half ago. In the meantime, we’ve tried a bunch of different products. Some have sucked, others are good. In some cases, the organic alternative cleaner just wasn’t good enough to justify its use, so we’ve stuck with conventional cleaners. What follows is the breakdown of products we’ve liked, organized by the area it cleans.

Surfaces

There’s a ton of surface cleaners out there in the world. They’re typically broken down by the kind of surface they’re meant to clean. You don’t spray 409 on wood. We were big 409 fans until we started on the organic kick. We tried a couple of different things, and found that we liked the Method brand of cleaners from Target the most. They have different stuff for wood and counter-tops, as well as cleaners for sinks and granite. They’re gentle, effective, and smell nice. We’ve never felt the need to wear gloves. It’s sort of dangerous, but if you get some 409 on your hands, you know what we’re talking about. 409 sort of burns. Method wants to be licked. It’s like we’re cleaning our counters with ice-cream.

We also have a bottle of very diluted bleach water under the sink for cleaning cutting boards. You make it by adding a cap of bleach to a gallon of water. It kills bacteria that can collect on a cutting board. We use it before and after we use the cutting board.

Floors

Our place is mostly hardwood floors. We were really excited to find out that Murphy’s Oil Soap is considered to be an organic cleaner. It’s biodegradable, and smells great. Remember that Murphy’s Oil Soap commercial with the lady cleaning pews in a church? No? I do. I love the smell of Murphy’s. Your house ends up smelling like a really nice library. Great stuff.

Bathroom

We have natural stone floor and wall tile in the bathroom, we haven’t found any cleaners that we trust. Instead we bought a terrifying steam cleaner. It’s called a Scunci steamer. This thing is probably the coolest cleaning product we’ve yet found. You fill it with water, plug it in, and in a few minutes you have the ability to shoot a jet of high pressure steam out the nozzle. It comes with a variety of attachments that make it relatively easy to shoot screaming steam at your floors and bathtub. When you’re done, the mirrors are fogged up and bacteria has been boiled off counters and floors. If you’re bored, it’s fun to pretend the Scunci is a jet engine. Everything is cleaner when it’s exposed to the uncaring hellfire of a jet engine.

Pots, Pans, Plates

This is where we couldn’t really hang with organics anymore. We tried some organic dishwasher detergents, they all pretty much sucked. We had to scrub everything before we put it in the dishwasher. We’re sorry hippies, we couldn’t do it. We switched back to normal Cascade.

As for hand washing, we use Seventh Generation Dish Soap. It smells like lavender, and gets stuff clean. For our stainless steel stuff, we use Bon Ami scouring powder. You can’t use it on teflon coated pans, but for stainless steel it’s great.

Laundry

We went 100% with the Seventh Generation brand of detergents and fabric softeners. Instead of using drier sheets, we switched to these Laundry Balls (as seen on TV). They clump around in the drier, beating our clothes into softness.

That’s all we have for now. It took a little bit of work to evaluate what we really like when it comes to cleaning products, but it’s been worth it. Although we still think the cats licking the counter-tops is weird, at least we’re not worried it’s hurting their tender little kitty bodies.

Dundee Marmalade

Published
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chrisandcamri
on March 2, 2007
in Food
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I was in sunny Dallas this past week at a geek conference. When I got home, Camri presented me with a jar of Dundee style marmalade. Although it’s really not wildly different than other marmalade’s I’ve tried, it’s distinct. The rind pieces are much larger, and more plentiful, which gives the marmalade a more bitter bite. It’s really pretty good, but I wouldn’t recommend it for someone new to orange marmalade. If marmalade is an aquired taste, this is the straight whiskey of the marmalade world. Recommended, but use with caution.

Although it’s uncited, the wikipedia offers this explanation of Dundee marmalade:

The Scottish city of Dundee has a long association with marmalade. The oft-related story of how this came about begins sometime in the 1700s when a Spanish ship with a cargo of Seville oranges docked in Dundee harbour to shelter from storms. A grocer by the name of James Keiller bought a vast amount of the cargo at a knockdown price, but found it impossible to sell the bitter oranges to his customers. He passed the oranges on to his wife Janet who used them instead of the normal quinces to make a fruit preserve. The marmalade proved extremely popular and the Keiller family went in to business producing marmalade. However this is almost complete fiction. The truth is that in 1797, James Keiller, who was unmarried at the time, and his mother Janet opened a factory to produce “Dundee Marmalade”, that is marmalade containing thick chunks of orange rind, this recipe (probably invented by his mother) being a new twist on the already well-known fruit preserve of orange marmalade.