Munchie Monday: Rip's Big Bowl Cereal

Two years ago I attended a Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine Food For Life class.

The class leader prepared three dishes for us to try.  Dishes that turned out to be "animal free".  Vegan dishes.  Surprising me again to find that meals without meat, poultry, fish, dairy (including butter and cheese), and eggs  could be so delicious.

To avoid the likelihood of losing the recipe, the ingredients are listed on the container...

One of the dishes she had previously made and brought for us was called Rip's Big Bowl...from Rip Esselstyn's Engine 2 Cookbook.  The class leader had many topping items.  Dried fruit, fresh blueberries,  flaxseed meal,  chia seeds, walnuts, pecans, and other things.  All these additions add extra nutrition to the cereal.

The Big Bowl Cereal was really nice.  Crunchy.  Flavorful with blueberries, nuts, seeds, almond milk on it.  One of the selling points of this cereal is that there is very little sugar in the components. When I made it at home I chose unsweetened Almond Breeze milk.  This makes one's first bite of it a little disconcerting if one is used to sugar-y cereals....This is solved by adding fruit to the top and eating a bit of fruit in each bite.

Rip's Big Bowl waiting to be eaten.

In the Food For Life class, I asked what size a serving of this cereal would be.  She said, "As much as you can eat!"  I thought that was a strange response.  Hard to believe.  You can't eat as much as you can eat of ANYTHING! Since then, when I have been consistently eating plant-based foods for weeks, I find you really can eat as much as you want without the scales screaming at you to hop off.  In my case, that turns out to be one-half cup cereal, one-half cup fruit, one-half cup almond milk and whatever nuts, seeds, and flax seed meal I want to add.

In case you cannot read the ingredients on the Big Bowl container:

Rip's Big Bowl
6 cups old-fashioned oatmeal flakes (or regular oatmeal but I like a little more structure to the grains so old-fashioned is what I use)
Shredded Wheat spoon sized cereal NOT SWEETENED--16.4 ounces
Uncle Sam cereal--10 ounces
Grape Nuts cereal--29 ounces

Basically, you use one box of each of these cereals.  Mix them together in a giant bowl then store in a tightly covered container.  This makes a lot of cereal.