Junk Food Nation, as many of you know if you follow me @junkfoodguy on Twitter, I have recently come into a wealth of red meat.  And not just any red meat, but pure corn-fed recently-cut Nebraskan beef.  And not just a little beef, but over 20 lbs. of beef.  My freezer is stuffed to the max.

I enjoy red meat in all forms: burgers, meatballs, sausage, steaks of all shapes and sizes, tacos, etc.  The juicier the better.  And while I enjoy eating meat, I certainly don’t rub it in people’s faces (too much).  I love vegetarian food too!  I love vegetables, beans, tofu, tempeh, quinoa, drink soy milk – its all good in the hood.  Whenever I meet a vegan or vegetarian, I don’t exclaim, “Oooooooooooh how can you not like meat!?” all douchey-like.  I respect their eating habits.  And most veggie friends respect mine (with the exception of one co-worker who put cute little pictures of baby pigs up in my office to shame me into no longer eating pork…all I can say is they looked tasty, Kristi).

The problem with this meat, I realized this morning, is once you have it, you can’t stop eating it.  I had steak fajitas the other night.  And for lunch.  Burgers for dinner.  And for lunch.  I’m going to have a steak today. And tomorrow.  And I’ll probably round that out with some Bolognese sauce this weekend.  There’s an old wives tale that some small percentage of consumed red meat remains undigested in your stomach your entire life.  Yikes.

Does anyone else have a meat problem like I do?  I usually pace out and vary my meat consumptions, but I am on a stretch of like five days straight now of red meat gluttony.  If you have good meat stories, leave them in the comments below!

Today’s junk food is a cereal, my first foray into this realm: Cocoa Puffs Brownie Crunch!

The Money Shot

Obviously, cereals like Grape Nuts and Special K are not junk food.  But when I walk down the aisle and see Oreo cereal, Rice Krispie Treats cereal and the like, I believe that these confectionary concoctions *do* fit into the junk food category.  And why not?  You’re just taking the junk food, crumbling it up, and calling it breakfast food!  I’m still waiting for Mint Milanos Cereal, Twinkie Cereal, and Cool Ranch Doritos Cereal.

Yep, that's a brownie pan

Cocoa Puffs by themselves are just little balls of chocolate-y dough, or basically Kix or Trix cereal with chocolate flavoring.  Their mascot Sonny the Cuckoo Bird, who exclaims, “I’m cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!” has been around since I can remember, going effing nuts for this damn cereal.  “I’m cuckoo for Coca Puffs, I’m cuckoo for Coca Puffs!”  Lock it up, Sonny!  You’re getting a little out of hand here.

Now Sonny is cuckoo for Brownie Crunch, as he is holding a brownie pan and shaking bits of brownie into a bowl of cereal.  Pretty blatant.  We’ll see about the taste…

The promise

General Mills apparently decided that Cocoa Puffs needed a facelift, resulting in this new cereal.  The front of the box promises larger cereal pieces that have the surface mottling that brownies have, plus some added chocolate chips.  Cocoa Puffs with chocolate chips?  I’m not complaining.

Little brownies?

Opening the box, the first thing I noticed was – why is the cereal WAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYY down there? Holy cow, did I just get ripped off?  I know there’s a lot of air in these packages, but good god!  Is there a prize that was misplaced?  Was that prize the other half of my box of cereal??

Cracked surfaces

The cereal in real life did look exactly like the cereal on the box, which is a good thing.  If you’re like me, you enjoy cereal with milk, without milk, in yogurt, in a sandwich (Breakfast Club, anyone?)  I’ve spend many a college day watching a ballgame, eating cereal out of a box, handful by handful.  (Yeah…things to keep to myself for $500, Alex.)

Let’s take a closer look:

Closeup 1

Closeup 2

You know, I have to give General Mills high aesthetic grades – up close, these cereal pieces did look like brownies!  The surface of each piece was cracked and varied, just like the surface of a brownie.  There was that great shine that the tops of actual brownies have.  Big chocolate chip pieces were embedded into every piece.  Looked good, but how ’bout the taste?

I popped a BIG handful into my mouth and, lo and behold ……… it tasted like Cocoa Puffs.  Boooo.

Not shocking I suppose.  But I wanted it to taste like brownies!  I wanted to get some more fudgey taste, some deeper richness that regular Coca Puffs lacked – but no.  This “Brownie Crunch” just had a strong cocoa flavor (perhaps more cocoa flavor than regular Cocoa Puffs), but did not prompt me to think of brownies at all.  Certainly very sugary.  Certainly tasty.  Certainly enjoyable in its own right.  And certainly part of a balanced breakfast (yeah right).  But because it didn’t deliver in the promise of its name, I won’t be eating these ever again.

Maybe they’re better with milk.

Sincerely, Junk Food Guy