Category Masticating With Mellzah

Adventures in Trashy Cooking

Special K Bars

Aaah, there’s nothing like a recipe that involves the addition of premade, processed foods, particularly if it’s a “diet” food, because as everyone knows, its inclusion automatically makes the final recipe a diet food. In fact, the massive gutache you get after eating a bunch of these and little else is just the diet working for you. Who wants to cleanse with lemonade if they can do it with chocolate?

1 cup sugar

1 cup light Karo syrup (Light=healthy)

1 cup crunchy peanut butter (The more processed, the better. None of this “natural” peanut butter crap)

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. vanilla

5-6 cups Special K

1 large package chocolate chips

1 package butterscotch chips

Boil the sugar in the light karo syrup. When the boil begins rolling, stop and mix in the peanut butter, salt, and vanilla. I find it’s helpful to have the PB, salt, and vanilla premeasured and set aside so you spend less time dinking over skin-melting levels of hot sugar. Then, mix in the Special K and pat into a 9×13 pan. Melt chips together and pour on top. Make some sort of swirly design on top with a spatula if you want. It’s your diet! If you’re taking if off very soon to some sort of pot-luck gathering, it can be put into the fridge for a while to set up the chocolate. Otherwise, the chocolate will set up just fine at room temperature. Cut into bars, or eat with a spoon. It is cereal-based, after all.

This post brought to you by Kitchenaid and the sin of gluttony

We made Italian bread today and homemade garlic butter. The recipe made two loaves, but we demolished one of them in a record five minutes owing to its hot, crusty, garlic buttery slathered goodness. Frankly, our friends are lucky if the second loaf makes it over for dinner tonight–we might gnaw on it in the car and come inside covered with crumbs and guilty grins.