Kraft Dinner is now Kraft Breakfast and there are no more rules

Everybody who has ever lived in their life likes to eat macaroni and cheese for dinner. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese is so popular as a dinner time treat, it’s simply labeled “Kraft Dinner” in Canada. But what if you wanted to eat Kraft Macaroni and Cheese at a different time of day? What if you wanted it for… breakfast?

This is unthinkable. It is called Kraft Macaroni And Cheese Dinner for a reason. Eating it for dinner is what you are supposed to do with it. You do not eat it for breakfast. That is a bad thing to do, and probably has spiritually negative implications. You are putting your mortal soul on the line by wanting to eat macaroni and cheese for breakfast. It is for dinner.

But Kraft is a kind god, and is willing to provide us an indulgence. Yes, soon there will be boxes of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Breakfast on shelves! Maybe, I don’t know, it looks like it’s part of some kind of contest where you can win a magnet and a mug and a box of the Breakfast and stuff I really don’t care about it. What I care about is that it will be macaroni and cheese breakfast! This is new ground. Nobody has ever eaten macaroni and cheese for breakfast before.

But what about it makes it for breakfast?

We rank the top 2 female breakfast cereal mascots that have ever existed

Here’s a challenge for you: name a single female breakfast cereal mascot.

Give up? That doesn’t surprise us. When it comes to breakfast, virtually every mascot is, for some reason, a man. Look up Post, look up Kellogs, all dudes. Cap’n Crunch, Tony the Tiger, the Cocoa Puffs bird whose name escapes me right now… Yep, all men. Not a lady to be seen. Even Lucky Charms has a guy for a mascot. Even Count Chocula. 

What about Fruity Pebbles, you say? Nope. Fred and Barney are clearly the mascots for that one. Not even Pebbles herself gets to be on the box. Even the very first cereal mascot in all recorded cereal history, Elijah from the actual bible, was a man.

Why is this? What is it about cereal that makes mascot designers simply go blind to half of the population? Is it because most of them were designed way back in the 40s, when men liked to pretend women weren’t real? The mysteries abound in the world of breakfast. Where have all the girls gone off to?

Well, dearest reader, we’re here to reveal the truth. There are female breakfast cereal mascots, and we’re going to rank… both of them. From worst to best. Yes, there are only two that we know of, and one of them is pretty dubious if it’s supposed to be a woman or not. But god damn it, we’re not working with a lot here, okay? So bear with us, as we rank the two best female cereal mascots there are.

Taco John’s Meat & Potato Breakfast Burrito has meat and potato indeed

Taco Bell may have betrayed us, but it’s a good thing they aren’t the only pseudo-Mexican-style food restaurant in the business. One of our personal favorites is Taco John’s, a distinctively Midwestern brand of ground meat slop shoved into tortillas that has managed to capture our heart. 

It’s no secret that our number one favorite fast food item is Taco Bell’s Breakfast Crunchwrap, which was definitely the reason we were distracted from noticing Taco John’s breakfast menu for so long. Though Taco John’s was our first stop if we wanted shitty tacos, Taco Bell had our hearts for shitty breakfast. With Taco Bell announcing that they’re going to be making unforgivable changes to their menu, we’ve been in the market for a new tortilla-wrapped breakfast delight.

Most of Taco John’s breakfast items were the standard ‘breakfast burrito’ kind of thing, but one caught our eye: The “Meat & Potato Breakfast Burrito”. With just good old meat, potatoes, and eggs in it, it was a potential challenger to the Crunchwrap throne.

So can the Meat & Potato Breakfast Burrito dethrone the Breakfast Crunchwrap in our eyes? Hit the jump and find out.

FOOD: Taco Bell – The Breakfast Crunchwrap Experience

Disclaimer: Due to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, we weren’t really able to go outside and buy a Breakfast Crunchwrap to take photos of for our article. We’re making do with stock images from Taco Bell itself. Sorry.

Taco Bell is something that is almost, but not entirely, unlike real Mexican food. We don’t like to parrot talking points about “authentic” food here on Eggware.XYZ, but we really do have to admit that Taco Bell is as far detached from Mexican cuisine as Magritte’s pipe was to a real one. But there’s a certain beauty in it: in a sense, it is pure and authentic ‘American’ cuisine, representing everything that makes the modern United States of America the way it is: its cheesy-potatoey strengths, and its blatant disregard for the cultures it has built itself upon.

Most of the most interesting offerings on Taco Bell’s menu are those that don’t try to ape Mexican cuisine, but do their own ‘unique’ things. This is a tradition of theirs stemming all the way back to the Enchirito, a mashup of an enchilada and a burrito in one saucy mess. One of our favorite concoctions is the Crunchwrap Supreme, a kind of rethinking of a burrito that is folded into a hexagon around a tostada. 

The Crunchwrap is what Taco Bell is all about. It’s designed in a way that makes it more convenient to eat than a regular burrito of similar size, and adding a tostada for crispiness is a clever textural component. There’s nothing like it anywhere else. We don’t want to imply that this is good food, or even particularly tasty. It’s just one of the little ‘innovations’ that you get in fast food, the kind that Taco Bell specializes in. Since Taco Bell works with a different palette of ingredients than most other fast food restaurants – tortillas instead of buns, loose ground meat instead of patties – they have more liberty to experiment and create strange concoctions. 

First released as a limited time offer in 2005, the Crunchwrap Supreme was popular enough to be added to their full time menu in 2006 and has been there ever since. And since the Crunchwrap Supreme was so popular, when Taco Bell introduced a new breakfast 2014 they added a Breakfast Crunchwrap to it. This was the most brilliant thing that Taco Bell has ever done.

FOOD: Wendy’s – Maple Bacon Chicken Croissant

Oh for the love of god not more chicken sandwiches

Okay, okay, we can do this. Yes, chicken is everywhere, and we’ve drilled that concept into your heads for long enough. Wendy’s, not one to be left out of a trend, has added a number of chicken sandwiches to its new breakfast menu – the most interesting one, to us, being the Maple Bacon Chicken Croissant.

On its surface, this sounds like a serious slam dunk. Fried chicken, bacon, AND a croissant bun? The only other place that does croissant buns in its breakfast is Burger King, and they’re definitely the least classy of the Big Three burger joints. Could Wendy’s deliver to us a real croissant, rich, buttery and flaky?

I mean, we doubt it. But there’s always hope, so hit the jump and find out.

FOOD: Wendy’s – Breakfast Baconator

I’ve had enough chicken! It’s breakfast time, boys! Wendy’s recently debuted an all-new breakfast menu, hoping to keep up with the rising trend of fast food breakfasts. Wendy’s for a long time has been the only member of the Big Three burger chains to not serve breakfast. While McDonald’s and Burger King have been slinging sausage for years, Wendy’s has only had Breakfast on and off through the decades. They tried in 2005, but pulled it in 2006 after bad reception. They tried in 2012, but stopped in 2013 after concerns that the breakfast menu was distracting from their main menu. They couldn’t seem to find the right balance that the other chains could.

Now they’re giving it another crack, with an all-new menu. This time it seems like Wendy’s knows what the people like, because the headliner attraction is a little concoction known as the Breakfast Baconator. Oh yes, that legendary mountain of meat gets a breakfast counterpart.  

Hit the jump to find out if Wendy can finally get this breakfast thing right.

FOOD: McDonald’s – McChicken Biscuit and Chicken McGriddle

From where we are in 2020, it’s hard to imagine McDonald’s was once a major innovator in the world of fast food. The McDonald brothers and Ray Kroc were the inventors of the fast food concept, after all! The modern-day craze for chicken can even be traced back to the Chicken McNugget, which solidified the idea of molded ground chicken products into the consciousness of America. Now, it is lonely at the top, and McDonald’s is looking more and more decrepit in the face of fresher competitors. Without a doubt the biggest thorn in their side is Chick-fil-A, the notoriously homophobic fried chicken sandwich business that is the most beloved fast food chain in America.

McDonald’s has been desperate for a decent chicken offering to keep up with modern tastes, but nothing has really landed. They’ve tried chicken wings, chicken tenders, all kinds of new chicken sandwiches, but none of them have compared to the juggernaut power of established chicken chains. But there’s another front to the fast food war going on: breakfast. Taco Bell introduced a new breakfast menu in 2014, and Wendy’s is planning to bring back breakfast this year – so why not, McDonalds thinks, combine the two hot new things?

And here we are, with McDonald’s adding the new McChicken Biscuits and Chicken McGriddles to their menu. If there’s anything McDonald’s has been solidly entrenched in, it’s breakfast. Their Egg McMuffins are still the byword for “fast food breakfast”. What could go wrong? 

Well, a lot.