‘Tis The Season

Somehow–and I honestly have no explanation for this–it’s December fifteenth already. That leaves no doubt: we’re definitely in The Season. And if by “The Season” you think I’m talking about any one of the eighteen or so holidays that happen between October 31 and January 2, you’d better guess again. Nope. It’s Chex Mix Season.

Not coincidentally, I wrote my first Chex Mix post essentially a year ago today. If you need to catch up on what Chex Mix means to me, go read that. I’ll wait.

See? It’s a real problem area for me. Last year, I was doing pretty darn well diet-wise. This year? Not so much. Which means that this crunchy snack has even more calories than it normally does. The Chex Mix knows when you’re weak and doubles its efforts against you.

Now if I were to sit down with a full box of regular ol’ breakfast cereal and started eating it, I doubt I could get through more than a few cups of the stuff. Odd then, how by adding nothing more than a stick of butter and two pounds of sodium, one can turn it into the bottomless snack. You know how they say birds can eat their own weight in bird seed every day? Well, substitute “Charlie” for “birds” and “Chex Mix” for . . . oh, well, you get the picture.

I made my first batches of it just this past weekend. The first batch is nine cups of cereal, one cup of pretzels, one cup of goldfish crackers (a new addition this year!), one cup of peanuts, and one cup of cashews. That might sound like a lot, but I can actually fit that in my mouth. And at two hundred degrees too. It’s amazing. I should be on television.

The second batch takes longer to eat: upwards of eight minutes. The third batch finally gets distributed to family members, which was, of course, the entire purpose of the exercise. At least I’m making sure they get only the top-quality, personally-tested snack food available.

I mean, a guy’s gotta have standards.