I adore having close friends come over IN-BETWEEN-THE-HOLIDAYS. To be more precise, after the family Christmas festivities but before New Year’s Eve and sometimes between New Year’s Day and my birthday on January 7^th, so ideally December 28th or January 4^th. Those days tend to be the safest days for everyone, no more indigestion, nor hangovers and usually more leisure & relaxation time, for them as well as for us, here at home.

It’s the ideal time to use whatever leftovers and half-used bags of stuff in the pantry and unfinished dishes & desserts you stored in the refrigerator and freezer.

Here’s a well-known, very popular, not fancy and simple north-american relaxed party mix for everyone. It’s made with thick square-shaped cereals, nuts, crackers, pretzels, butter and/or oil, salt, sugar, condiments like Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco sauce and a mix of finely ground spices. It’s well known in North America but completely foreign here in Europe, which is why I came back from Canada with some boxes of these cereals that I like to use for this, even though I never eat breakfast nor ever have a desire for cereal any morning.

The cereals used here have to be thick and textured and square-shaped so you can use anything that resembles that and available in your neighborhood supermarkets. You usually need regular, whole wheat and/or rice CHEX or WHEAT SHREDDIES or CRISPIX. The rest of the nuts, pretzels, crackers and spice mixes are all up to you and whatever is close at hand.

Proportions are important, which is why in this recipe, it’s all about the number of cups of each and the amount of the “coating mixture” required.

For 12 cups (half cereal and half nuts, crackers, pretzels), you will need about 30% of that in weight in the spicy coating mixture, so 12 cups + ¾ cup liquid coating + 3 ½ tbsp dry spice blend or 12 cups mix + 1 cup coatings = the TOTAL PARTY MIX.

All spices need to be very finely ground or they won’t stick (even with all the butter, oil and liquid condiments) so forget about using dry herbs if they’re not as fine as powder and no sesame seeds nor poppy seeds either, because they’ll fall to the bottom of the roasting pan and BURN !

Anyways, just follow the recipe and enjoy the happy IN-BETWEEN-HOLIDAYS period . . . :)