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Recipes

Use Your Unwanted Halloween Leftovers for This Monster Chow Mix

This article is written by a student writer from the Spoon University at UCD chapter.

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

Difficulty:BeginnerPrep time: 4 minutesCook time: 5 minutesTotal time: 9 minutesServings:20 servings

Ingredients

Instructions

  1. Cat Taylor

    Gather your u0022combo mix:u0022 9 cups total of any combination of cereal (here we used Chex, Golden Grahams and Rice Krispies), chips, crackers, cookies and popcorn.

  2. Cat Taylor

    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.

  3. Cat Taylor

    Find whatever else you want to throw into the mix and chop if needed.

    #SpoonTip: These can be all the leftover Halloween candies like Mu0026M’s, crumbled brownies, chopped candy bars, candy corn, marshmallows, whatever, go nuts. Oh, and nuts.

  4. Cat Taylor

    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).

  5. Cat Taylor

    Stir in the peanut butter.

  6. Cat Taylor

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

  7. Cat Taylor

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

  8. Cat Taylor

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

  9. Cat Taylor

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

  10. Cat Taylor

    Reward yourself for repurposing leftovers with a hefty handful.

Cat is majoring in Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior (try saying that three times fast) at UCD, as well as minoring in art. She likes running so that she can justify how much more she likes eating; spending immense stretches in the darkroom developing film; rain, shetland sheepdogs, and brussel sprouts.
Current kryptonite: Diddy Riese ice cream sandwiches.