Chex Mix; feeds armies

Huh. I could have sworn I’d posted my Chex Mix recipe before… it must have been deleted in the Accidental Blog Purge of 2019, when I thought I was going to shut this place down. I spent about an hour this morning flipping through cookbooks trying to find the index card with my grandmother’s recipe so that I could show you how it’s morphed over time, but alas, I could not find it. So, hopefully from memory…

(keep in mind that she made one batch of Chex Mix, just for family for snacking, so with an idea of about six to eight ‘servings’)

1 stick butter
1 tablespoon steak sauce
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon hot sauce

2 cups Rice Chex
2 cups Wheat Chex
2 cups Corn Chex
2 Cups Cheerios
2 Cups Pretzel Sticks
1 Cup Cashews
1 Cup Walnuts
1 Cup Pecans

1 tablespoon garlic salt
1 tablespoon seasoned salt

Preheat oven to 250

Melt butter and combine liquid ingredients

Pour cereal and nuts into baking pan

Sprinkle dry ingredients over cereal and nuts

Pour liquid ingredients over cereal and nuts

Bake at 250 for two hours, stirring from bottom to top every 30 minutes

Enjoy!

I make a lot more than that. And what I put in it can vary depending on what I can find at the grocery store when I go. I don’t care for pretzel sticks, so I’ve stopped putting them in, and started putting in some Honey Nut Chex and Honey Nut Cheerios – that little bit of sweetness really adds something, especially with the salt. It doesn’t seem to matter if you use name brand vs store brand, but always, ALWAYS use real, salted butter. Don’t use margarine. Just… don’t. Trust me. I tried it once and pitched the whole batch, it was a gross greasy mess.

It has especially varied since I moved out here to the sticks, because if I have to drive all the way into town to find stuff, I’m not doing that twice. I stopped using soy sauce, because I have a friend who can’t have it, and I’ve started using Old Bay, because I’m from Baltimore.

So my recipe is now more like…

2 sticks of butter for every roasting pan
Half a bottle of steak sauce for every roasting pan
1/4 bottle of Worcestershire sauce for every roasting pan
About twenty shakes of hot sauce for every roasting pan

1-2 boxes Rice Chex
1-2 boxes Wheat Chex
1-2 boxes Corn Chex
1-2 boxes Honey Nut Chex
1-2 boxes Cheerios
1-2 boxes Honey Nut Cheerios
1-2 lbs Cashews
1-2 lbs Walnuts
1-2 lbs Pecans
1-2 lbs Almonds

A lot of garlic salt
A lot of seasoned salt
A lot of Old Bay

Preheat oven to 250

Melt butter and combine liquid ingredients

Pour cereal and nuts into roasting pan

Sprinkle dry ingredients over cereal and nuts

Pour liquid ingredients over cereal and nuts

Repeat until all your roasting pans and ingredients are gone

Bake each roasting pan at 250 for two hours, stirring from bottom to top every 30 minutes (I can fit two pans in my oven at once, and I rotate which one is on the top and bottom rack as I take them out to stir every half hour)

I don’t always buy as many roasting pans as I need, so if I need to reuse them, I pour everything into a bin as it’s done in the oven. This gives me a big thing to mix it all up in, also.

Feed your armies!

If you’re local; Wards is a really great place to get nuts in bulk. I happened to be at Sams when I was thinking about Chex Mix, and saw that they had those three-packs of cereal, and they had a lot of nuts, so I just got them then rather than have to run more errands. But just about every other year, I’ve gotten them from Wards.

And… there ya go! I’m not a professional recipe writer or anything, so, please, be gentle, haha. Oh, and don’t forget to put SO MUCH LOVE into this as you’re making it! Love and the joy of tradition and ritual really does make it better.

xoxo y’all