In her adorable, well-crafted, thoughtful, delicious, personal and fun new cookbook, Bake and Destroy: Good Food for Bad Vegans
, Natalie Slater describes this recipe:
Rabid Puppy Chow fans might recognize some of these ingredients. (Heh, get it? Rabid.) “Puppy Chow,” for the rest of you, is the somewhat unappetizing name for the traditional mix of chocolate, peanut butter, and rice cereal that showed up most often at sleepovers and school parties. In this version I’ve added some tasty new elements and even a superfood or two for good measure.
So, I put off making the recipe. I put off making it until the day before my stop on the Bake and Destroy Blog Tour. And then, (out of desperate necessity?) I had an epiphany. Suddenly I wasn't wishing that I was assigned the pretzel dogs of the dead or even the cannibal corpse crockpot. I realized that this was one simple recipe I could totally get my children to make for me.
When I picked up the first grader (first grader!) and his pal from school, I pitched it to them:
Do you want to do your spelling homework....or do you want to do your READING and COOKING homework? You can READ this recipe and then MAKE it! (The secret to parenting is an ENTHUSIASTIC tone of voice.)
They got right to work. Their assignment contained chocolate, and peanut butter, and confectioner's sugar. Those are some motivating and difficult words to sound out.
There was also math involved. We need 9 cups of cereal for the recipe. There are 13 in the box. How many cups of cereal can we eat while we cook? (Safeway brand rice chex do not contain BHT. I am more wary of BHT than raisins, because I do not know what that is.)
There was more math - the kind that comes with managing a small herd of children and more than a cup of powdered sugar. There are 3 boys, and 9 cups of cereal to dump in the big bowl. How many cups of cereal does each boy get to dump?
At this point in our math lesson, we added way too much chocolate. (Fractions!) Things were starting to spin out of control. And then I couldn't find a plastic bag for the final shaking step, so we took more turns gently stirring, i.e. swinging powdered sugar and oozy chocolate bombs all over my kitchen.
Bake and destroy, indeed.
But then we tasted it, and we talked about the ingredients, and the first grader, fresh from red ribbon week where they're talking about age appropriate healthy choices like eating more real food, decided that maybe he did like raisins after all, and he observed:
So, it's good and bad.
Yes. Let's have some more.
Cujo Chow
From Natalie Slater's Bake and Destroy: Good Food for Bad Vegans.
Makes: 12 - 14 servings
Takes: 10 minutes for grown-ups, longer for beginning readers
- 9 cups (279 g) Corn or Rice Chex cereal
- 1 cup (146 g) salted cashews
- 1 cup (93 g) shredded coconut
- ½ cup (75 g) raisins
- 1 ¼ cups (214 g) vegan chocolate chips
- ¾ cup (195 g) peanut butter
- ¼ cup (57 g) vegan margarine
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- ¼ cup (28 g) flaxseeds
- 1 ½ cups (187 g) confectioners’ sugar
Place the cereal, cashews, coconut and raisins in a large bowl and set aside. Place the chocolate chips, peanut butter and margarine in a microwave-safe bowl and microwave for 1 minute. Stir, then microwave for another 30 seconds if everything hasn’t melted yet. Stir in the vanilla and pour over the top of the cereal mixture. Mix everything together, then sprinkle with the flaxseeds and stir those in.
Place the mixture inside a 2-gallon (7.6 L) resealable plastic bag, add the confectioners’ sugar and close the top. Shake until everything is coated. Spread on waxed paper to let cool.
