@TheFingerOfGod: I have steel cut oats and the only way I can make them is 30-45 minutes simmering on the stove top.

Rolled oats cook quicker but I don't like them as much. I know that you can microwave rolled oats, but I've never heard of trying it with steel cut.

P.S. . . . I ran out of condensed milk and started using brown sugar instead. I can tell you with certainty that it is the condensed milk that makes this concoction tasty!

You know. . . I think they are steel cut! LOL they are the ones that cook the quickest but I can't imagine that the microwave would not work with all oatmeal (that is just conjecture by the way).

I just LOVE the bowls! Since they were bought for me I eat everything in them. They provide a nice "portion size" for me!

Baked on a pizza stone, it comes out so good. Bad thing is we go through it so fast I have to make two loaves about every week and a half.

Huh? I grew up in an age before all this Nanny State Regulation. My parents knew instinctively that "sugar = bad". Although I hated them for it at the time, we NEVER had any of the "tasty, yummy" sugar cereals at home. Now that I is all growed up, I know my parents did the right thing.

People need to take personal responsibility for their actions and not rely on the State to bring about Utopia. I don't need some government agency to tell me that Lucky Charms are bad and that an apple is good.

You can most definitely make him eat meat and sugar. Make him sit at the table till his plate is clean like my parents did. He will eventually eat it

@drewconrad: Chex and Crispix are some of my favorite cereals, primarily because they taste great when you mix a bowl of them with a cup of yogurt.

I bowl of crispix + 1 cup light yogurt = yummy, filling breakfast with only ~250 calories! :D

As firm as you can be as a parent, sometimes it's a hard choice between parenting and your own sanity.

@Kimaroo - No Stars Upon Thars: They are not that bad for you in the grand scheme of things. Not to mention they have a decent amount of fiber and will keep you fuller for hours compared to something like fruity pebbles. If you have to have a little sugar in your cereal I would recommend frosted mini wheats

@pecan 3.14159265: I'm not a big fan of oatmeal but that's because I used to always make it with water. I recently started to make it with 1% milk and now find myself loving it.

(disclaimer that I know you like gourmet food but I am referring to microwaved instant oatmeal, not steel cut oats)

Anyways, you should definitely try the Pecan Bunches and Almonds variety of Honey Bunches of Oats. Right now the pecan bunches is where its at.

With a bread machine, you basically dump everything in and it bakes, but you're limited in what kinds of bread you can do and the quality is consistent but only fair-to-middlin' with most.

If you make it "by hand" you can use a stand mixer to avoid the hard physical labor (although some people prefer to do it by hand, and some people like the exercise!) and you have a lot more control over the recipe and quality. To get a loaf shape, you just need a loaf pan (couple bucks). The downside is you'll have to be there to punch down the dough after the first rise and to put it in and take it out of the oven.

But a bread machine is a single-task appliance and an expensive one that takes up a lot of room. A stand mixer does all kinds of things. I own both, and I put the bread machine away basically the instant I learned that making my own was just as easy, as long as I had the dough hook for my stand mixer.

That's right. The parents.

@laughingisfree: I love honey bunches of oats, but for some reason, I find it just too sweet. Is this the case for you? I've even tried the vanilla box, just to see if it was any less sweet, and it isn't.

I kid, I kid!

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): But isn't the point of the breadmachine to actually produce loaves of bread in the loaf shape? What would a stand mixer have to do with bread, other than mixing the dough.

junip: Puffed wheat is better.

@Xerloq, we are all made of stars.: Ha, that's almost exactly what I order when I go to Huddle House for breakfast -- no steak, no grapefruit, and the short stack is a waffle.

If this really works, you might have changed my lil world.

And I do not gain weight easily. Lol. If you knew me, you would understand just how funny that thought is.

@rocketbear79: That's why I switched to fat-free milk. Now every other milk type tastes like cream rather than being refreshing.

That said, you could consider pitas for your sandwiches, either store-bought (typically have fewer ingredients and are more natural than bread) or homemade (easier to "split" than bread is to slice, IMHO). I don't know what the cost differential would be, though.

Then again, you may be one of them coordinated folks who can manage to slice textured breads without catastrophe. :)

Kashi is on the list, and I LOVE Kashi Heart2Heart... it's probably my favorite cereal, but the price is a killer. I love Kashi cereal, but it's $4.25 or so, and you get much less cereal than a large box of cheerios, which runs about the same. I can get about 5 bowls worth out of Kashi, and the last bowl is usually crums or whatevers on the bottom of the bag.

I eat a lot of cereal, and a lot each serving... But, really, why so expensive Kashi!?

@kaceetheconsumer: HFCS-laden "wheat" bread is the reason why I'm looking into breadmakers, and seeing whether it would be feasible for me to make my own loaves of sandwich bread. I mean, I can get a loaf for $1.80, so I doubt making my own would be that much cheaper - but I'd rather have a loaf of bread with ingredients I can pronounce and have measured out myself.

@morlo: It's sad that I can really only eat oatmeal that has some kind of sugar in it. I want to experiment with blending regular oats with chopped up apple or something. I've tried eating regular oats with raisins, but by the time I add enough that it's palatable, it's more raisins than oats.

Exactly. WTF does "whole grains" mean in context of an actual food? You'll see it on processed foods everywhere and people have heard from industry, government, doctors, etc for several years now that "whole grains" = healthy. And to an extent, it's true.

But I've seen HFCS-laden white bread with some oats sprinkled on top bearing a "whole grains" label. Hell, you could take a single whole oat, wrap it in dog turds and unrefined uranium and call it "all natural with whole grains" because dog turds and uranium do occur naturally, after all.

The sugar cereal industry has worked really, really hard over the years to trick moms into buying their crap. They extol the virtues of the added vitamins inside. They put up pictures with a small bowl surrounded by fruit and milk and call it a "serving suggestion". They use three or four kinds of sugars instead of one, so when mama reads the ingredient list, the first ingredient will be wheat or oats, or maybe cram in both to get the top two spots, and the mama maybe doesn't realize that some of the chemical names listed further down really are sugar.

Plus, with the marketing at kids, the kids start to beg and whine and plead, and while there are lots of ways to say no or avoid the request, there will always be exhausted, busy parents who cave because if it gets two of the four kids to shut the hell up during the Wednesday evening grocery trip after three 10-hour work days with two more to go, then it's bloody well worth it. I'm not going to sit in judgment of that parent!

"Add fruit and milk and you'll have all the nutritional value of... fruit and milk."

Doesn't seem to be so much of a parody now, does it?

I wonder what the expiration date is?

Some of the Puffins flavors are good. Don't eat them without milk, though. The cinnamon kind is like a giant explosion of dryness.

OM NOM NOM.

@TheFingerOfGod: An oatmeal smoothie is also a super-fast, easy, portable breakfast. Into the blender goes your fat-free yogurt and milk, fruit, oatmeal, maybe some orange or cranberry juice. Puree, shake, drink on your way to work.

@Xerloq, we are all made of stars.: I don't think he knows about second breakfast, Pip.

I think I'm missing the nuance of your point, because this is pretty much what I was saying -- except that it doesn't "allow" it, it attempts to manipulate you into doing it. (And if it didn't work, they wouldn't pay nearly so much for it.)

Ever try to win the argument against a six-year old who *MUST* have [insert favorite tv character] cereal?

--1 cup of steel cut oatmeal (bulk bin from whole foods)
-- 1.5 cups of water from my brita filter
--Put both in my nice little muji bowl: [www.muji.eu]
--4 mins in the microwave
--1 to 2 tablespoons of condensed milk (2 tbls 130 calories, 30 calories from fat, 23g carbs, 3g protein)
--freshly grated nutmeg (I get the whole nuts bulk from whole foods and grate it on my micro-plane)
--.5 cups of raisons (bulk bin whole foods)

That's it. It could not be easier. The one benefit is that in the 4 mins it takes to nuke the oatmeal I get to wash my dishes. Sink clean before I leave the house!

If I had more money I would buy all sorts of dried fruit. As it stands I have had to use the Thompson (I think they are Thompson) raisons when what I realllllly want are the golden variety. But if I could I would put dried pineapple, cherries, cranberries. I would also put all sorts of nuts if I did not have diverticular disease! SIGH!

@Hooray4Zoidberg: I "make my own at home" by purchasing teddy grahms and a tub of whipped cake icing. It tastes the same, and you get more without having to open those stupid containers.

PS. I am not encouraging you to do this, I'm sure it's terribly unhealthy, your milage may vary. I probably do this only once a year when I feel the craving.

PSS. I'm feeling the craving now. Crap.

Spare us the victim mentality. It's not the advertiser's fault if you're fat or unhealthy. It's yours!

Whining to your politicians and decrying evil advertising will not solve your problems.

Take control of your own life, and your own choices.

No, they really aren't that bad.

@howie_in_az: That's not what I remember "Dunkaroos" to be.. They were lil roo shaped grahm crackers and a small serving of icing to dip them in.

Did this generic cereal company steal the name?

That should hold me 'till second breakfast.

@drewconrad: When I was a kid, my favorite cereal was Graham Chex. Sadly, it was dicontinued in 1997 when Ralston Purina sold the brand to General Mills after manufacturing the Chex line of cereals for 60 years.

Advertising is effective because it allows people to make an emotional decision in place of a logical one. Since "people have been educated into idiocy" and the claims made by advertisers are difficult to evaluate, people choose not to make a logical decision in favor of making the easy emotional decision.

In other words, you're free to choose, but make sure you know what the choice is.

On another note, my 3-year-old has turned himself into a "hippie-loving vegan." Try as I might, I can't get him to eat meat or sugary cereal.

@Kimaroo - No Stars Upon Thars: I don't know the answer to your question, but next time you're grocery shopping pick up a box of Post Shredded Wheat (the only ingredient is wheat). I find that the plain stuff from Post has a much better flavor than the frosted Kellogg's variety and it costs half as much ($2.50/lb vs. $4.29/lb).

I used to eat a lot of toasted rice cereals (generic Rice Krispies), but now all the manufacturers add sugar to it, which is just a waste in my opinion.

Here's the Quaker Natural Granola Oats & Honey & Raisins nutritional info for the hyperlink-disinclined.

420 calories
12 g fat (7 g saturated)
30 g sugars
6 g fiber

Advertisers can hit the kids dead-on 99% of the time.

They could sell Poopy-O's to my kids if the commercials have enough superheros and loud noises...

Interesting that they don't note heavy advertising for Mini Wheats. Nick and Disney are often on at our house and I see more commercials for them than any other cereal. Perhaps it's just a relatively new campaign, but I seem to remember them being pimped for quite a while.
Now, there should be no reason to advertise Cocoa Pebbles. There is no greater cereal on the face of the earth and everyone should already know that. Semi-soggy, chewy Cocoa Pebbles FTW!!

They're every bit as awesome as you remember them, trust me.

But hey... it's got riboflavin!

Does the cereal come in fun sizes????

@cabjf: Thanks for adding to my "cereal to try" list, I love peanut butter.

@lawnmowerdeth: Stays with you, doesn't it? I'm craving Cookie Crisp; that one was forbidden from my house because of the price. I had it at my friend's house EVERY once in a while, and I still remember it being awesome.

How sad is that?

Do they still make that? I occasionally see cereals I thought were long gone, that seem to just be holding on in very select markets.

The Almond Flax Kashi Go-Lean Crunch stuff is pretty good, but the regular Kashi is kind of like eating a bird's nest full of wood chips. Not even drowning it in Greek yoghurt (fat free, super high protein, lower carb than other yoghurts) can make it bearable for me.

@pecan 3.14159265: That cinnamon flavored Chex is like crack.

Just a note on granola, it's really a high carb type of food. It should be used sparingly (like sprinkled on yogurt or mixed in with cereal or GORP (Good Old Raisins and Peanuts).

One of the biggest BS lines in commercial history was the old "Part of a balanced breakfast" line. And they always showed a bowl of the cereal, surrounded by some toast, a grapefruit, an egg, and a big glass of orange juice.

It's also no coincidence that grocery stores put these cereals at kid-height rather than the top shelf.

You can't have it both ways.

@drewconrad: Now I want a bowl of Chex. I loved Chex when I was a kid.

and besides, i grew up on quisp and count chocula, and look at me, i'm on the internet!!

@pecan 3.14159265: I recently got a free sample of a Kashi cereal that I thought was pretty darn good.. It looked like lil yellow pillows and the flavor reminded me of Kix with a touch of honey flavor.

I just had to look it up but it's called Honey Sunshine.

I was pleasantly suprised by this.

@hillsrovey: Yea, but you are getting way more fiber and protein and less salt in the granola.

Granted, sugar content is important, but you should look at other things too.

And even if they could, and they only thing they know about breakfast is "store-bought cereal," what are they going to do about it?

I consider myself pretty nutritionally-savvy, but even just looking at these baby books (as my baby is starting solids), the information in them is contradictory, confusing, and sometimes outdated or just wrong. And these are your well-respected, mainstream baby books, not "raise your child a hippie-loving vegan!" or "Sugar: It's What's For Dinner."

Chex for the win! Course... I add sugar. Doh.

@hillsrovey: I used to love the rice krispie cereal. It was actually pretty bland, but I liked it.

I don't eat cereal nearly enough to justify eating woodchips and cardboard (I'm looking at you, Kashi). Just give me my Captain Crunch once a week and I'll work longer at the gym.

I'm being honest here: Are Frosted Mini Wheats really that bad of a cereal? I mean.. it is MOSTLY wheat.. isn't it?

I'm sure the frosted ones aren't as good for you as the non-frosted variety.. but is the little bit of frosting on those things enough to be lableld as a bad-for-your-kid sort of thing?

I'm sure it's better than what I used to eat for breakfast.. lol.