Joe's O's (and other miscellany)
Just a few short things because I'm running behind today!
A reader (I think Kristin from Going Country?) recommended I try Joe's O's from Trader Joe's for one of my post-shift cereals, so I did.
I was impressed by the shape of the O's; it was more reminiscent of a true Cheerios shape than most off-brand versions are.
However, to me they tasted sort of sweet but bland, as if they needed a little sprinkle of salt. I googled to find out if anyone else felt this way, and apparently, I am not alone.
So, I'd say I like the way the Aldi version tastes better, but the Joe's O's are more visually appealing.
I'm used to writing for an audience
I've realized a reason all these school writing assignments feel a little pointless: they're being seen by almost no one!
I'm used to writing for people; I type here, hit the publish button, and then ta-dah! It's in front of an audience.
But for school assignments, I work hard on writing a well-researched paper, I edit it, reread it, edit it again, submit it, and then...one person reads it.*
That is a tiny bit unfulfilling.
Especially for someone accustomed to blogging life.
*In some classes, I have my doubts the professor was even reading what we submitted, because my classmates and I got the same exact generic feedback on our submissions.
I really need to do a freezer challenge
After four years here, my chest freezer has gotten a little bit too full.
And my kitchen freezer is kind of a mess too.
(You know that saying, "Wherever you go, there you are."? That's me with freezers; no matter my address, I will eventually fill up a freezer. Ha.)
I feel like I might have a little bit of mental space this semester, so I'm hoping to do some freezer challenges. I'll probably do them bite-sized like I did many years ago, taking just one little freezer section each week to work on.
This is perhaps a sign my life is feeling a little more manageable; I can actually consider a freezer challenge!
Ok, that's all for today. See ya tomorrow for Thankful Thursday. 🙂
I have a freezer compartment rather than a freezer; I guess the upside of having that and a small fridge is being able to keep track of things and having less food waste.
I'm trying not to eat or buy sugary foods this month to improve dental health (and to save money) so I put some cookies and chocolate in the freezer. Not opening it and eating them is my freezer challenge 😉
That is actually very clever!
Thank you! I didn't want to throw the food away and hopefully it'll taste even better in October, assuming I get through the challenge!
I used to do that with homemade cookie dough: I'd freeze it in scoops so I could make just one. Till I learned how much I like frozen cookie dough.
That wouldn't last a day in my fridge. It is my Kryptonite.
WilliamB,
Lol! When my sisters and I were kids (and then teenagers), we would make chocolate chip cookie dough, roll it into logs and freeze it. I don't think we EVER baked a single cookie from those frozen logs. 🙂
I love frozen cookie dough. Frozen cookies too. Are there 12-step programs available for this?
When my kiddos were in school, tubs of single scoop frozen cookie dough was a fundraiser - multiple flavors mind you. Enough to bake with the occasional snack of frozen cookie dough. I've never taken eating raw cookie dough as a risk nor eggs over easy. After six plus decades, if it was going to make me sick/kill me, it would have happened.
We left the original cabinetry in the 1912 renovation of the River House. This gave us a "European" size refrigerator according to the appliance gal. I immedeiately planned to put the old frig in the garage. However, we have lived with less for about 2 months and honestly it is fine. True that there is just two of us and I have been not cooking like I use to cook from sheer overwhelm in life. I am going to live with it for a season for the exact reason you said - it is less food waste. I live out in the country. It is eat what is in the fridge or nothing.
We do have a farm shop a couple of acres over to house extra stuff when we have a party.
Our house and therefore kitchen are very small. So when we redid the kitchen, we chose stove, fridge/freezer, and dishwasher that are about half the regular size. For instance, the stove has 4 burners, but being more narrow, the oven will fit a jelly roll pan (10”x15”) but not a regular size cookie sheet. For the two of us, it works fine. The only thing I miss is more fridge space when I am cooking a holiday dinner or otherwise having company. We do have an extra freezer that helps.
I've missed your freezer challenges. They always inspired me. Both my boys recently left for college so my husband and I have committed to work on eating down the freezer (now that we don't need to make full meals for supper). My one son was notorious for getting freezer foods from Trader Joe's and only eating 1 or 2 servings and leaving the rest so we have lots of randomness in there.
I'd like to second and repropose a question for a future post: what would you do differently if you had $10 million? (Since $1 million doesn't buy what it used to.) I'm interested in the answers from both Kristen and the Commentariat.
My father asked if maybe I could make morning glory muffins for him when I visit. It's hard to express how unusual this request is and I'm pretty touched.
With a bit of research I learned that I wasn't imagining it: downloaded podcasts really are disappearing. It's an iOS 26 bug that Apple still hasn't fixed.
I noticed this the other day! 3 of the ones I would download weekly did not have that option last time.
I prefer to download podcasts into a small MP3 player that clips onto my shirt, and use wired headphones since the pods tend to fall out of my ears while I'm doing anything physical. My new phone doesn't have a headphone jack, and I don't want to deal with hauling a phone around to workout or do chores anyway.
If I had $10 million dollars I would pay off the rest of my student loan, travel, enroll myself in whatever courses I was interested in, give money to family and friends, buy somewhere cool to live (along the lines of Enya and getting a castle with lots of cats) and then donate the rest to causes I believe in. I would try to be like Dolly Parton and help as many people as I could and set up some program like the Imagination Library 🙂
WHAT?? Enya lives in a castle?? Does she still make all that restful music?
Fun $10 million challenge, WilliamB! Me, I'd probably do the following:
(1) Accomplish all deferred maintenance around the house and grounds, and rent an AirBNB or similar while the interior painting and wood floor refinishing are going on. (I know my limits.)
(2) Hire a 20-hour-a week gardening assistant. My lawn care/snow removal guy is a wonder at what he does, but he doesn't know one garden plant from another, or the weeds from the intentional plants.
(3) Build a real greenhouse (not just my current pop-up plastic variety) somewhere on the grounds.
(4) Give lavishly to my preferred charities: JASNA, Doctors Without Borders, the Alzheimer's Association, Heifer International, and my local food bank.
(5) And squirrel some of the money into my investment accounts, given the recent dire predictions about what's going to happen to Social Security and Medicare.
All those $10 million projects sound terrific but it is practically impossible to find workers. When we do, they don't return phone calls. If they do, they don't show up to give an estimate. If they do, they don't bother calling back with the estimate. AND if they actually take on the job, they don't finish. Infuriating. I don't understand why people aren't hungry anymore. And it isn't just me being demanding. Everyone I know is having this situation.
The great recession of 2008 killed the trades. Literally as some died/committed suicide and others found a non-skilled trade job. Better half and others in the trades have so much knowledge to pass down but very, very few to pass it to. It is sad and I have ABSOLUTELY NO SYMPATHY when construction/trade companies complain they can't find help. Look back at your greed and the greed of banks/mortgage lenders. I remember hearing radio ads in the late 1990s saying "don't put 20% down on your house. Borrow as much as you can and invest that 20% in the stock market/investments".
So family and those in our circle of friends benefit from my better half's knowledge and experience. A couple of family members have a chance to pass it on.
Yes, I can do that in a future post! And to everyone: you can reply here if you want, but if I were you, I'd save it for when we do a dedicated post. 🙂 It'll probably be more fun that way when we all are sharing.
Cool! I'm particularly interested in what daily habits we'd change. For example, how much would we still buy second hand?
Same with the freezers at my house! I had them about half cleaned out, and then found some good clearance and sales, and they're full again.
And when they get too full it's "out of sight out of mind", so it does me no good to stock up and then repurchase something I already have.
(FYI - I'm on a desktop chrome browser, and a Halloween KitKat ad at the bottom just moved up and took over 3/4 of the screen until I closed it. Never had that happen on your blog before. the bottom ad usually only cover a few inches)
Yay, a freezer challenge!
That was definitely not me, given that I have never even been in a Trader Joe's. I did once note in a post of mine, though, that I never buy off-brand Cheerios because they are uniformly inferior to the name-brand. Unlike the giant bags of generic cornflakes (Food Club) and crispy rice (Malt o Meal) that I do buy and are a good alternative to the name brand. Maybe that's what you were thinking of.
Hmmm, I wonder who it was!
There are a lot of Kristens/Kristins in the world, and here . . .
Kristen, although I recall mentioning a while back that Joe's O's are a great value, I don't recall recommending them specifically for your post-work meal. My last box didn't taste as good as previous ones, but I'll likely give them another try.
I recently accepted frozen ripe bananas and a couple bags of frozen cranberries from a neighbor that was not going to use them. I need to make muffins and share some of them. Thanks for the reminder.
Hugs to you William B. for a thought provoking query. I've been doing a freezer challenge for a couple of months now. I have 4 chest freezers, 1 huge fridge, a shop fridge and a garage fridge. I don't count the barn fridge because it is for animal inoculants, vitamins and naturopathic serums.
Plus human metal water bottles for chore breaks.
I am working to clean out the fish freezer and turn it into apple cider freezer for making out of season acv.
If I had $10 I would expand our family's foster foundation. There is such need! I would love about 10 more duplexes or row houses for the kids to step up from the apartments.
I have yet to find a toasted oat O cereal other than Cheerios that is gluten-free for DH. Cheerios was $6.99 for a large box the other day and I actually said, "Good grief!" out loud while looking at the price.
That's how I felt the last time I bought canned corn.
No freezer challenges at my house. We sold the freezer and bought a side by side refrigerator 20 years ago. Voila—I can remember the inventory. It’s not roomy, frozen pizza-wise, so we order fresh pizza. Problem solved.
A side by side came with our current home. Just-hated-it and as soon as we could, replaced it with a French door frig with bottom freezer. My folks *always* had a bottom freezer. I will never have another side-by-side. We have a small upright freezer (which we defrost) which is on the main floor. I've entertained getting a small chest freezer for the basement. Given the state of the economy, it just might happen. I received a chest freezer when I moved out into my first apartment. As did my kiddos. I'd likely use a basement freezer for garden produce and overflow meat. Better half does an excellent job of freezer management.
Please rate profs that you feel aren’t even putting on the effort to read student papers. No one will know otherwise how lazy they are.
Hello
Have you ever tried no spend January or the pantry challenge in February? It helps people use what they’ve stored up in the pantry and freezer each year. In other words, you’re not able to accumulate too much expiring food. You only buy what you need to finish off your meals, pay bills, that sort of thing. By the end of it people have recovered from holiday spending and report saving quite a bit of money. It’s a movement.
I recently looked at an adjunct professor legal writing position at a law school and realized that the pay would come out to about $1500. For a semester. For teaching legal writing and then reading and giving detailed feedback on legal writing assignments. I’m not surprised a lot of professors are phoning it in. This is ridiculous because it’s not like law school tuition school is cheap. Idk what the compensation is for your professors, but that might be part of your dissatisfaction.
Also no shade to you or to nursing in general, but when hospitals do things like require all RNs to get a BSN, these programs spring up to meet that requirement as cheaply and quickly as possible. You don’t seem to be learning things in this program that you feel will make you a better nurse. This is similar to making teachers get their masters degrees so that the school can say that the teachers all have their masters and then these one year nights and weekends masters programs spring up. They don’t really make better teachers, just teachers with more credentials and debt.
That is a CRAZY low amount of pay for that much work. Insulting, even.
And yep agreed about the fact that some of these types of degree requirements seem to be for institutional clout and not for significant improvement in our skills.
I find the Trader Joe's O's cereal does not taste like anything ! And the texture is bad . Yuck !! I don't plan to buy them again.
I hear you on the freezer! We have the same issue and I keep meaning to "eat down the freezer" but then I see some discounted meat or an offer on frozen veggies and I cannot resist.
So if you do a freezer challenge I'll join you.
This post made me laugh. We only eat TFG Clump-a-licious Granola. I make a double or triple batch, seal it tightly and we're good to go.
Over the years, I've tricked it out a bunch. Typically, I use cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and cloves. I add ground hemp hearts, sesame seeds, freshly ground flax seeds, sunflower seeds and flaked coconut.
I use chia seeds to reduce the amount of oil needed. Soak in water in a large measuring cup, then add the sweetener(s), then the liquids. Stir together and pour over the dry ingredients. I have a giant salad bowl that I use to make stirring easier. I've also found it unnecessary to grease the baking sheets.
Can you tell I'm a Costco shopper? You can add or subtract ingredients based on whatever you have in your pantry.
I say a little prayer of thanks to you every time I make a batch.