My friends Jen, Tairalyn, and I love to cook and bake and we thought it'd be fun to see what happens when we take one recipe and approach it three different ways. I like to play with ingredients and try to find healthy(ish) alternatives to traditional ingredients (but you'll have to pry butter from my cold, dead hands.) Jen is a ninja when it comes to substituting healthy ingredients to truly healthify recipes. And Tairalyn is taking one for the team by making the recipes in their full sugary, buttery glory (she really is a saint.) This month we're tackling Super Bowl snack mix.
The biggest offenders (for me) in the original recipe were the popcorn oil (I don't even know what that is!) and the artificial flavour mix. I decided to make my own spice mix and go for a sweet heat flavour. I thought it might clash with the cheese crackers the original recipe called for so I decided to keep my crackers plain.
Ingredients
1 bag pretzels
1 box mini Breton crackers
1 box multigrain Wheat Thins
1 cup peanuts
1/2 cup raw sunflower seeds
1/2 cup dried cranberries
Sauce:
3/4 cup melted butter
2 Tablespoons dried minced onion
1 teaspoon dried garlic powder
1 Tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon Tobasco sauce
1/2 teaspoon cayenne
Method
In large bowl, mix together pretzels, crackers, peanuts, and seeds. Mix together sauce ingredients. Drizzle over cracker mix and toss to coat. Spread on two cookie sheets and bake at 250F for 45 minutes, mixing every 15 minutes. Remove from oven and mix in dried cranberries.
So I wouldn't call this snack "healthy" but there are worse things you could be eating on Super Bowl Sunday. The nuts and seeds add a bit of nutrition and eliminating the popcorn oil (seriously - what is that?) made me feel like I deserved some hippie credit. Warning: this recipes makes a lot of snack mix and it's addictive once you start munching.
