Use Your Unwanted Halloween Leftovers for This Monster Chow Mix

Despite dedicating efforts to vacuum down my yearly sugar quota each year on Halloween, I'm always left with an array of odds and ends following the holiday and its many parties: a half bag of chips, stale sugar cookies, maybe a few edges of brownies, perhaps even those disdained bags of personal pretzels and, of course, stray candy bars if they survived the ravaging. 

This stuff tends to stay littered across our apartment's already limited counter space, using up about every useful piece of Tupperware and possibly sitting around untouched until Christmas. Nobody seems to want that handful of crumbled Oreos left from the caramel apple toppings bar, but for some reason, we don't throw it out. 

Here's why this recipe is so great: you put all the things you don't want anymore in a pot, throw in some broth, crank up the heat and magic happens to give you something amazing. Well, here I present to you the soup of the Halloween leftovers world—some call it puppy chow, some muddy buddies. You just have to gather your Halloween remnants, a jar of peanut butter and some of your favorite crunchy snacks.

Ultimate Halloween Leftovers Chow Mix

• Prep Time:4 mins
• Cook Time:5 mins
• Total Time:9 mins
• Servings:20
• Easy

Ingredients

• 9 cups "Combo Mix"
• 1/2 cup peanut butter
• 1 cup chocolate chips your choice
• 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
• Leftover Halloween sweets

• Step 1

  Gather your "combo mix:" 9 cups total of any combination of cereal (here we used Chex, Golden Grahams and Rice Krispies), chips, crackers, cookies and popcorn.

  

• Step 2

  Chop your combo mix into bite-sized pieces. Crush up bigger foods like cookies or chips, but don't annihilate them to a dust.
  
  #SpoonTip: Neutral, salty snacks like Original Lays or Goldfish work great; cheesy Doritos, less so. Maybe. I'm actually not sure. Try it out and let us know.

  

• Step 3

  Find whatever else you want to throw into the mix and chop if needed.
  
  #SpoonTip: These can be all the leftover Halloween candies like M&M's, crumbled brownies, chopped candy bars, candy corn, marshmallows, whatever, go nuts. Oh, and nuts.

  

• Step 4

  Melt the cup of chocolate chips in a medium sauce pan over low heat.
  
  #SpoonTip: Go for a little extra melted chocolate (and peanut butter) if you want a fudgier mix (especially if you plan on adding a lot of mix-ins at the end).

  

• Step 5

  Stir in the peanut butter.

  

• Step 6

  Remove from heat and pour into your 9 cups of combo mix and additions, coating it all in the chocolate peanut butter bliss.

  

• Step 7

  If you want everything more melted and melded together, add more of the chopped sweets now, coating them as well.

  

• Step 8

  Transfer the mix to a large plastic bag and shake up with powdered sugar.

  

• Step 9

  If you want a more heterogenous mixture, add in whole pieces of the leftover sweets now.

  

• Step 10

  Reward yourself for repurposing leftovers with a hefty handful.