Tuesday, August 22, 2006

The Cereal Saga


It started last week, when I was explaining to my team at work about my excitement of going to the Cereal Barn, a new restaurant in town. The Cereal Barn offers 30 different types of cereals. You can mix and match. Plus, they have "mix-ins"....fruit, nuts, granola and sadly, even candy. They also offer PB&J sandwiches with freshly-ground peanut butter. I was planning to visit the Cereal Barn last week, but didn't make it. I was excited b/c we're not big cereal eaters around here. Our cereal adventures tend to stick with the healthy kind - grapenuts being the favorite. The DH does make a lot of oatmeal...the chewy steel-cut kind.

So, all this build up with the Cereal Barn discussion.....then the "grapenuts incident" yesterday. :-) I was closing up a box of grapenuts, and I was smooshing the air out of the bag. I happened to move my head over the box at the same time, and I poofed a bunch of grapenuts dust into my eye. It really hurt! I rinsed my eye and didn't think much of it until ~30 min later when I looked in the mirror. My cornea was really swollen. It scared me, so I was diligent yesterday about icing my eye on a regular basis. That seemed to do the trick, and my eye is pretty much back to normal today.

Well, to round out this story, we did walk to the Cereal Barn this morning. I had a small bowl with Corn Flakes/Life cereal and strawberries/walnuts as add-ins. (The basic bowl includes 2 cereals and 2 mix-ins.) The DH had grapenuts (the nerve!) and honey grahams, with bananas and strawberries. We split a PB&J with honey-roasted nuts and orange marmalade. I thought it was great fun, but the DH wasn't all that impressed. His comment: "I could make this at home." Very true, except that we never buy Corn Flakes or Honey Grahams! >-)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow! That would probably be my favorite restaurant considering my love of cereal! I'm very sorry that the grape nuts attacked you!!! I hope your eye is all better now. See you this weekend.
keri

Anonymous said...

The Cereal Barn franchise was recently featured on the national news. It's a neat idea. Are they open all day? When I was a kid, my mom thought it was fun to have breakfast for dinner periodically (waffles on a Friday night, anyone?).

Do you still get to read the packaging as you eat? :D

John said...

There was this interesting blog about 'innovation' that I recently read and the author's point was that sometimes you don't have to come up with something new...you just have to present it in a new way. Sounds like the Cereal Bar is following that line of business. Personally, I stopped eating cereal when I was in college (except for, like Tom, a bit of oatmeal...especially in the winter months). I do however like a good PB&J for breakfast...or even better a good almond butter & J. I'm not sure how I'd feel about everyone crunching their cereal around me. Hey, thanks for the nice card. It is always good to hear from you and Tom.