Anyway, moving on.
I burnt my cereal this morning!
This sounds like a slightly unusual statement to make - I was toasting puffed millet and amaranth under the grill, but got distracted by something on the internet and forgot I was toasting cereal until I wondered what the strange popping sounds coming from the kitchen were.
Burnt Cereal
No great catastrophe, a wee bit black on one side, but I ate it anyway as I hate to waste. (Also, I don't mind things a little bit dark sometimes.)
I guess this could be a good opportunity to talk about cereal. Man gluten-free cereal can be expensive! And some of it's pretty uninspiring, as well. I've always been a fan of nice toasted muesli with crunchy oats and lots of good bits and pieces. Most gluten-free 'muesli' is basically just some blend of different things that I consider 'cereal', such as puffs or processed bran flakes - things that don't hold their crunch in the face of milk. Other so called 'muesli' has turned out to just be rice bubbles with a very sparse sprinkling of seeds and fruit. I know I shouldn't be sucked in by the pictures on the boxes, but I am still disappointed every time they exaggerate the proportion of delicious to boring ingredients.
The cereal/'muesli' I buy most commonly is Healtheries Apricot and Coconut Muesli. This is generally one of the cheapest products I can find in the supermarket without completely giving up on the type of thing I like to eat for breakfast. At $7 a box it's still not actually cheap, but it's often got a small discount, and it's way better value than the $10 or $11 that most boxes of similar products seem to be.
I did once find a small stone in my cereal - but I was happy with the response from Healtheries, who sent me a courier bag to send them the stone for analysis, as well as a voucher for free cereal. Yay!
Not having that voucher with me one day when I went to buy cereal, I decided to try a new and very fancy looking product: Brookfarm gluten-free macadamia muesli. This Australian cereal had two silver medals and a bronze medal stuck on the front (well - not the medals themselves, but icons that represented them), and I could see (and taste!) why. This was some seriously gourmet muesli. It did cost about $13 for a mere 350g, but I am still sure I would buy this again. Actually, I tried to, but the supermarket only had two gluten-containing varieties.
The macadamia muesli has buckwheat (puffed and not-puffed), rice (bran and puffed), and amaranth, as well as cranberries, currants, and sultanas, macadamia nuts, and pumpkin seeds. These were tastily toasted and crunchy - and I fell instantly in love with the crunch of the buckwheat, which sunk to the bottom of my cereal bowl for me to enjoy at the end! My only half-hearted complaint about the taste of the cereal is that it was really a bit too sweet. At 14.3g of sugar per 100g, it's actually lower sugar than my regular cereal (19.9g!), but it certainly tastes sweeter. Actually, because rice milk is so sweet by itself, I prefer a somewhat less sweet cereal to go with it.
Actually, I'm surprised that the macadamia muesli is lower in sugar, higher in protein and fibre, and though higher in fat overall, it's lower in saturated fat!
My plan is to combat the sweetness (and the price!) of the almost perfect macadamia muesli by mixing it with some plain grains to tome down the sweetness and make it go a bit further. That's why I was toasting puffed millet and amaranth - I had bought both for this purpose and I was testing out ways to give them a bit more crunch. It occurred to me that this might not save money, given that the millet and amaranth were about $6 a bag each - but perhaps I can get them cheaper elsewhere. I do hope I can source the macadamia muesli again, even though the puffed cereals alone make quite a tasty breakfast.
So that's me on gluten-free cereals. Apart from hot cereals - I haven't perfected those yet. I currently mix rice flakes and cornmeal, but they don't match the flavour of good old hearty porridge (don't forget the salt)!
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