Review: Quaker Real Medleys Cherry Pistachio Oatmeal +

Conspiracy theorists like to say that eventually the world is just going to be run by a handful of corporations. I never hear Quaker included in that list, but they might as well be since they seemingly produce half the food in my grocery store.  Okay, that's a HUGE overstatement on my part, but it at least conveys my main point...they produce A LOT of product and definitely keep me busy here on the blog.  Their bread and butter products are their oatmeal products, so here I am grabbing another one of those products with this review of the Quaker Real Medleys Cherry Pistachio Oatmeal + that I picked up on sale at Marsh for $1.25.  This container of oatmeal is 2.57 ounces and has 290 calories with nine grams of protein.  It's a just add water (either hot water or regular water and then heat in the microwave), so it's so simple a caveman could do it.  Sorry, I had to steal the Geico line.

I'm lazy, so I added water, stirred and threw it in the microwave for one minute.  Prior to that though, I took a look into the container and what I saw were a healthy amount of pistachio chunks and a solid amount of almond shavings.  Also included were a fair amount of dried cherries, so based on the name of this hot cereal (I love how Quaker technically calls it that), everything was also represented quite well visually.  One other thing of note was that this had a particularly strong smell of brown sugar prior to me adding water and being that I'm a very large fan of brown sugar and it's heavy sweetness, I was almost giddy when I smelled that.  Adding a slight kick to that brown sugar smell was the smell of sweet cherries as well, so this clearly passes the nose test.  One thing that perhaps only me finds humorous about these Real Medleys products is the size of the actual oat pieces in the containers.  They are enormous!  Perhaps it's because I'm used to eating ground up instant oatmeal, but seeing large oat pieces always makes me privately chuckle.  Yes, I have a few screws loose.

After my lazy microwave preparation, I stirred this up, let it sit for a minute prior to the instruction and dug in with my first spoonful.  What I got was a mouthful of salt slapping me in the face due to the pistachios.  Goodness, their flavor was strong and it was especially salty.  It also did not help the fact that salt was an added ingredient to the oatmeal, so that just added to the flavor as well.  While I didn't particularly like the salt factor, I did find the crunch that they brought to the oatmeal to be particularly fun.  My oatmeals usually only included dried or fresh fruits that are already soft, so the crunch of nuts was a welcome change of pace. Adding to that crunch was the almonds shavings, although adding to the crunch was basically all they did since they are typically such a mild tasting nut.  As for the cherries, I'd love to say that they brought a ton of flavor to the table, but the saltiness of the pistachios completely took this over and phased them out.  There was the occasional mild sweetness and tartness of cherry flavor when I specifically tried to get a spoonful that did not include any nuts, but based on the spreading of nuts in this, those spoonfuls were few and far between (as were all spoonfuls since this wasn't a particularly large container).  Ordinarily, I'd be pumped up and excited for a large amount of nuts in any of my food products, but in the case of this, the nuts actually detracted from the flavor because they were so salty.

Buy It or Fly By It?  If I didn't do a good enough job describing it already, I'll just lay it all out here...this was too salty.  I'm okay with a minimal amount of salt from time to time and actually seek it out occasionally, but this crossed the line and gets a FLY BY IT rating.  Perhaps a person that craves salt would find this enjoyable, but that person is not me.

FLY BY IT!!