My love affair with Kashi GoLean began when I was just 17 years old. On the morning that I took my SATs, I ate it for breakfast  and found that it magically kept me full for hours, unlike so many of its cereal aisle counterparts. Ever since, GoLean has been my go-to cereal.

It’s tasty in a bowl with milk and fruit…

…as a snack with nuts and dried fruit…

…and even blended into a breakfast pudding.

This afternoon amidst my statistics homework, I grabbed a handful of this blessed cereal and noticed something different about its taste.

Specifically, the “twigs”—my favorite part, mind you—had a new texture. The GoLean I know and love has lovely crunchy, thick, sugar-glazed twigs; this new box seems to have thin, sugar-less, cardboard-like twigs. By digging around to the bottom of my cereal container, I verified the difference:

Tragic. I’m sure I am the only person who consumes enough of this cereal to notice the difference, but it saddens me nonetheless. I liked my twigs the way they were.

Have you ever experienced something similar? Has one of your favorite products unexpectedly changed its formula?

Now that I have revealed my obsession with a mere breakfast cereal, let’s get onto some other grub.

Before heading to the doctor’s office, I fueled up with some oat bran. Strawberry-coconut is such a delicious combination in any form—cold cereal, hot cereal, smoothies, French toast…Try it!

For lunch, I prepared an Ellie recipe, Spinach Salad with Warm Bacon Dressing.

My tweaks:

-I used tempeh bacon instead of the recipe’s combination of regular bacon and Canadian bacon.

-Tis not the season for apple cider, an ingredient required for the dressing. I couldn’t find fresh cider anywhere, so I reconstituted some of the powdered variety instead.

At first glance, I thought this recipe would be difficult to veganize; I figured that the fat rendered from the bacon (typically absent from tempeh bacon) would be used to make the dressing. As it turns out, health-minded Ellie discards all the bacon fat from the pan and instead makes a warm dressing from the oil used to cook the onions and mushrooms. Genius! This salad was hearty and delicious, and I can see myself making it again—the tasty mustard dressing alone would be worth the trouble!

The recipe is available online: Spinach Salad with Warm Bacon and Apple Cider Dressing

Once dinner-time rolled around, I put together a quick curry. I like this recipe so much that I am putting it on my list of recipes to post for you all this weekend.

With that, I bid you good night. Til tomorrow…

Filed under: Meals