UPDATE: It’s roasting in my convection oven right now. Smells. So. Good. I added a little Sriracha sauce to the seasoning.
Those rye chips are my favorite too so imagine my delight the other day when I was at my local drug store and found they have bags of Gardetto’s rye chips with nothing else included. Just pure oily, salty, crispy, rye deliciousness. Woohoo! Now, if only I could justify eating them on my diet then all would be right with the world.
My parents used to make the original Chex Mix when we were kids in the 60’s. That was some good eating!
If you or someone you know has a Costco membership, you can get boxes of Chex with separate bags of wheat, rice and corn in them. It would probably be a bit cheaper there than buying separate boxes at the store. And while you’re there, you could get a jumbo jar of nuts to go in the mix too. Yum!
Don’t forget the LSD. (Add it last, after cooking, so the heat doesn’t break it down.)
For me, homemade Chex mix given as a gift was always a Christmas tradition (and one of the few things that my mother and I ever made together in the kitchen), so I refuse to make any outside of the month of December for reasons of tradition.
I thusly have very strong feelings on this issue. This thread is really stirring up deep emotions.
I, like kaylasdad99, remember when they were marketed by Checkerboard/Ralston-Purina (whose logo was a red and white checkerboard: thus the “chex” shape of the cereal). I also remember when the boxes were the right color: Blue for Rice Chex, Yellow for Corn Chex, and Red for Wheat Chex (and later: Brown for Bran Chex, which we never bought).
Now, they are wrong: Rice is Blue, Wheat is Yellow, and Corn is Green. WTF is THAT???
Wheat Chex are awesome just by themselves with milk. It’s the Corn Chex that I can’t stand as cereal. Oddly enough, they’re my favorite in the Mix.
I’m not a big fan of pretzels, but I’ll tolerate them in the mix, so long as they’re not pretzel STICKS. My mother used to use those, and every time I tried to cram a handful of CM into my mouth, I’d dang-near perforate my soft palate.
Cheerios are good, and Kix would be good (although I’ve never tried them in this).
If I’m going to use one kind of nuts, I prefer cashews to peanuts. Mixed nuts are too exclusionary (there’s bound to be something that isn’t liked by just about everyone…even if it isn’t the same something from person to person). I’ll use them in a batch for myself, though.
I, too, prefer the basic recipe: butter, Worcester sauce, garlic powder, onion powder. Anything else is an adulteration of the mix I grew up with.
The prepackaged stuff is crap. The “wheat squares” aren’t even the same (Wheat Chex have wormy-looking interiors with a mesh exterior…no worms, but wormy-looking…like squares of Life cereal used to be if you bit them open; the prepackaged “wheat squares” are hollow like the “corn squares”).
Anything else is a bastardization. I wouldn’t mind some hotsauce and things, and sure: trailmix (including dried fruit and chocolate pieces) isn’t bad on its own.
It’s just not CHEX MIX to me. Dagnabbit! Now I’m hungry, and it’s only February.
Just so you know, my local grocer has been recently carrying a product by Gardetto’s:
SPECIAL REQUEST Rosemary & Olive Oil Bread Chips
I’m not sure how the flavor would mix with traditional Chex Mix, but they are obscenely good by themselves.
OK, so it’s done and it’s pretty darn good. Definitely better than the pre-packaged Chex mix. But it’s not quite as decadent as I remember. I think next time I might increase the sauce to cereal ratio to ensure I get some outlandishly buttery pieces.
Hmmm. What if I added a little brown sugar and cayenne pepper?
All right, that’s it. I’ve doctored this stuff every which way but loose, I’ve been eating it all frickin’ day, and now I’m thirsty from all the salt I’ve ingested.
I hope you’re happy, Rocketeer.
Mm-woo-hoo-hoo-ha-ha-ha! (rubs hands evilly together) 
What, are you on some kind of freaky diet where you only eat each June? Are you hibernating?
I’m goin’ crazy over here!
That brings up a curious question. Could we hook ourselves to the Dope during REM sleep, so we could dream out threads and posts? (Well, OK, one would probably want it to be saved for later review rather than directly posted, but still…)
They’d need to make the timer on the edit function go out to eight hours.
Or four months, for certified hibernators…
Given that most Dopers are back from lunch by the time I wake up, an extended edit function wouldn’t do me much good.
I already add cayenne to mine, but brown sugar? Hmmmm…I still have some Chex left in the tub. Maybe one more batch…
The last batch was made of:
1/3 each Corn, Wheat and Rice Chex, just fill the big bowl 2/3 full, don’t measure
1/2 small bag of regular Goldfish
1/2 small bag of parmesan Goldfish
1 stick butter
1/2 cup Worchestershire sauce
6 or 7 glugs of Red Rooster pepper sauce
3 glugs of Tiger sauce
a palmful of seasoning salt
a palmful of mixed garlic powder and onion powder
4 dashes of cayenne
4 dashes of half-sharp Hungarian paprika
a few cranks from the pepper mill
I don’t like nuts or pretzels, so I freely make substitutions. My TA’s just inhale this stuff if I take it to school.
No, no, no…(not that I’m arguing your “goin’ crazy” claim…
). It’s just that because making Chex Mix was one of the few positive cooperative experinces that I had with my mother in the kitchen, and given that it only happened just before Christmas, and given that she’s several years ago passed away, I keep the tradition alive by only making Chex Mix at home during the month of December. For the rest of the year, I suffer without…as a memorial, of sorts.
Don’t feel obligated to follow suit, please. It’s just me, really.
(I will admit that I’m rather miffed to see on the back of the current Chex boxes the “original recipe” including bagel chips, which it most definitely did NOT. The crispix things are okay, though, even though they aren’t original, either.)
sigh
homesick
Years ago I read where you could freeze Chex mix…they even sold special decorated tins, which are somewhere in storage…and I envisioned having a massive Chex Baking Day and having a steady supply in the freezer for months on end. That was probably 20 years ago, and I’ve still not gotten around to ever freezing any…it never lasts long enough to make it into the normal storage tubs I use, much less get down to the freezer! And then there was the time we took some to my brother’s house for Thanksgiving Day, and my daughter spilled it on the floor in the back seat of the car…both my kids got straight to work trying to beat the five second rule, because the thought of not getting any to eat after smelling it for three miles was unbearable.
You’re talkin’ those little crackers like they give you on the airplane, right?
God dammit. I had this all out of my head until I saw this thread.
grumbles and drowns his sorrows in extra crunchy potato chips and Cheez-Its
Well, yeah. Unless you’ve just come from a carnival with your kids.
Doggone it, that’s what I get for doing a vanity search! A double batch is in the oven as I type