A Holiday Snack

As we get nearer and nearer to the most commercialized holiday of them all, there are a couple of things that always get made around HBIC Headquarters. The first thing is always homemade Irish cream, and I'm pretty sure that this has become tradition around the holidays in both my home and my parents' home. It's just so good! The second thing has less to do with the holidays than one may expect, but the markets near me always seem to have the ingredients on sale right around this time of the year. I'm talking, of course, about the pictured snack above known as Chex Mix!

Now I know you can buy Chex Mix rather than making it, but where's the fun in that? In saying this, I haven't perfected any sort of flavoured Chex Mix yet, but the traditional mix is fine with me. The nice part? This recipe yields a heckuva lot of Chex Mix which is perfect for holiday parties!

Ingredients

3 cups Chex cereal

3 cups Shreddies cereal

2 cups Cheerios cereal

1 cup pretzel sticks

2 cups peanuts/pine nuts

½ cup melted butter

¼ cup Worcestershire sauce

1 tbsp seasoning salt

1 ½ tsp garlic powder

1 tsp onion powder

It's up to you which version of Chex and Cheerios you use, but I prefer the Rice Chex as it gives a lighter party mix than the heavier Corn Chex does while the original Cheerios are much better for the mix than the multigrain Cheerios are. I also break the pretzel sticks in half so that they are easier to pick up in a handful than as a full stick, but feel free to use other shapes of pretzels if you prefer.

Directions

Preheat the oven to 325F.

In a large mixing bowl, mix all the dry ingredients together until you're happy with the results.

In a separate container, whisk the butter, Worcestershire sauce, seasoning salt, garlic, and onion powders together. Drizzle one-third of the whisked liquid over cereal mixture and toss well to combine. Do this two more times - whisking the mixture befoe drizzling - until all of the whisked liquid has been added to the cereal mix. When ready, split the seasoned mixture onto two evenly-divided baking sheets.

Bake for ten minutes with one tray on upper rack in oven and one tray on lower rack. Switch the two trays after the ten minutes for another ten-minute interval. Once fully baked, remove the trays from the oven and allow to cool. Store your Chex Mix in an airtight container.

You might notice by the amount of cereal you're adding to the first bowl that you're going to end up with a lot of Chex Mix. This recipe will yield about 12 cups of Chex Mix while still leaving you lots of cereal left over for future batches of your own homemade Chex Mix.

The nice part of this recipe is that you can cut the salt content if you want to reduce your sodium intake. You can add more Shreddies if you want to add some additional fiber. You can up the Cheerios amount for good heart health. You can cut the "bad fat" content by swapping the butter for a healthier oil such as canola oil. In short, you can make your homemade Chex Mix far healthier than the store-bought version marketed by General Mills.

I made two batches of Chex Mix today, so I will have lots of Chex Mix to share with friends, snack on at work, and put out for parties. There's no shame in admitting that I prefer this to other snacks such as potato chips, so I'm going to enjoy this snack over the next couple of weeks. Here's hoping you do too!

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!