Snack of the Night: Cap'n Chewy Bars

These are basically rice crispy treats with Cap'n Crunch cereal instead and a little bit of one of my favorite ingredients, almond extract. Note the high measurement of cereal compared to a normal rice crispy treat recipe. This is because the cereal is measured before you crush it, so it seems like more than it really is.




Ingredients:

• 10 c Cap'n Crunch cereal (almost a whole 14 oz. box!)
• 4 Tbsp butter or margarine
• 10 oz. marshmallows (most normal-sized packages are 10 oz.)
• 1/2 Tbsp almond extract

Begin by measuring out the Cap'n Crunch into a bowl and crushing it into courser, smaller bits. You're not going for a fine powder here, though--you want the pieces to be similar in size to the size of rice crispy cereal. The reason you're crushing it is to make the cereal a bit denser. I tried making these before without crushing the cereal, and it didn't really stay together very well because it was much larger than puffed rice and it was hard to form it into bars. After you crush the 10 cups of cereal, it should end up fitting into somewhere around 6 cups of cereal, since more of it fits into the measuring cups at once. If it's more or less, that's okay, as long as it's about in the ballpark. Here's a picture of what my cereal looked like after it was crushed:

The size of each piece will vary, obviously. Some are still whole, while some of it turned into a powder. You're going for something between these two extremes.

I went back and forth between using a potato masher and my own hands to crush the cereal. I'm not really sure which worked better. I'm thinking using my hands was a little better because I could feel exactly what I was doing. The potato masher just ended up making the stuff on the bottom turn into a powder before the stuff above it got crushed very well. Anyways, experiment and see what works best for you. After you finish, set the bowl of crushed cereal aside.

In a medium saucepan, melt the margarine over low heat. Add marshmallows and almond extract, stirring until the mixture is melted and blended, not lumpy.

Pour the marshmallow mixture into the bowl and mix with the cereal evenly with a wooden spoon or spatula. Spread and press this firmly into a buttered 13x9 inch pan. Cut into squares when cool.

Coming Soon...

We are at the end of our month's food budget and running out of ingredients, but I still wanted something besides rice or cereal (oh yeah, we're also trying to stretch out the last box of cereal and 3/4 gallon of milk to last the rest of the week). Specifically, I wanted some potatoes, and I wanted a lot of cheese! Check back on Friday for our Three Cheese Roasted Potato Melt recipe!  Coming soon to a Hungry Huguenins blog near you! YUMMMMMM!

Snack of the Night: Deep Fried PBJ

One magical summer, while Dustin Williams and Tim Huguenin were working at Camp Grace and playing in the swamp on their day off,  they came across a muddy, old oil lamp.
     "Hey, g'on an' rub that thang," Tim said.
     "Okay," Dustin said.
     Dustin rubbed the lamp and cleaned the mud off, and out popped a Kitchen Genie.
     "I am David Davison, the Kitchen Genie. What do you want?"
     Dustin and Tim didn't even have to think about it. In unison, they answered:
     "Deep fried peanut butter and jelly."
     And that is how the deep fried peanut butter jellies came into existence. Or something like that. Below I will relate the steps to make this mystic delicacy yourself.

Ingredients:

• Oil for frying (you can either use a deep fryer, if you have one, or just put in enough peanut or canola oil into a saucepan to be able to submerge the PBJs)
• Peanut Butter of your choice (use the stuff without hydrogenated oils--it's better for you!)
• Jelly or Jam of your choice (grape or strawberry is my favorite for this recipe)
• One roll of 8 Jumbo Sized refrigerated biscuit dough sections (I like the flaky kind for this)

Start warming up the oil in preparation for the cooking. I'm not a pro deep-frying-man or anything, and I don't even own a proper deep fryer, so if you've got one, maybe you know how to work it. I just pour enough canola or peanut oil into a saucepan so that I will be able to submerge one or two of these things in the oil, and I think I've had the best results cooking on a medium to low temperature (too high will burn the outside and not cook the inside of the dough).

While the oil is warming, take equal parts peanut butter to jelly and mix them together in a bowl. You'll probably use less than you think--about a spoonful of mixture per biscuit section. If you have the 8-pack of dough, go ahead and put about 5 spoonfuls of peanut butter to 5 spoonfuls of jelly, just to be safe. You can always eat the leftover PBJ mixture by itself when you're done. Or make a PBJ sandwich. Mix it up until it is pretty smooth and has a kind of gross color to it.

Flour a surface so that your biscuit dough will not stick to it, then take one of the biscuit dough sections and flatten it out well with your fist or fingers. Try to keep the circle shape.

Place a spoonful of the PBJ mixture into the middle of your flattened biscuit dough section. Feel free to try to cram as much in there as you can, but keep in mind that too much can cause your dough to not seal fully and cause a big gooey mess.

Fold the dough over the spoonful of PBJ mixture and press down the corners to seal. It is very important that you get it completely sealed off. When it cooks in the oil, the dough will expand and any cracks in it will open up. I pinch and press down with my fingers until the dough becomes almost one with itself, then I fold the edge over and do the same thing again.

Fry in the oil until the outside is a brown color. Remember, if the oil is too hot, it will brown fast but the inside of the dough will still be gross and gooey. If you think it's not cooked all the way through, you can keep going. It just gets browner and browner and eventually super crispy and burnt on the outside. Just use your judgement.

Repeat this process for each delicious PBJ morsel. Careful: the inside will be very hot when it comes out of the fryer. Let it cool for a couple minutes then enjoy. 

A lot of the magic goes away after they get cold, and they're not as good then. So eat them all at once.

Snack of the Night: Sriracha-infused hummus and crackers

What's a better snack than crackers and hummus? Crackers and hummus mixed with a healthy dose of rooster sauce!