In testament to the fact that the entire month of July passed without a single post here from me, I would just like to start out this post with this fact: I made the following recipe for my family’s Fourth of July celebration this year. I am, apparently, spectacularly lazy when it comes to posting about my cooking as the pictures have even been uploaded to my Flickr account since July 6th. Oops?

In any case, today I’m here to talk about Puppy Chow, which is a ridiculously easy to make and ridiculously addictive dessert. Let’s not talk about the fact that July 5th? Yeah, all that leftover puppy chow was breakfast. Puppy chow goes by many names… my Uncle Mike would prefer we call it Chex Mix with Crap On It. I’ve heard it called Muddy Buddies, and just the other day it was on Jon and Kate Plus 8 as Monkey Munch. Call it what you want, I call it delicious.

First the list of ingredients: Chex cereal, or any offbrand equivalent. I chose the corn variety, but you can use the rice instead. Whatever floats your boat. Chocolate chips, peanut butter, butter or margarine, vanilla and powdered sugar.

The first thing I did was measure out 9 cups of cereal. Then I added a little more cause hey, we all know I’m going to sit here and pick at the cereal in the bowl while I wait.

In a saucepan, melt together 1/4 cup butter or margarine, 1 cup chocolate chips, 1/2 cup peanut butter.

When it’s all melted together, stir in 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla.

Add the cereal to your melted chocolate mix, and *carefully* stir together. You want to get the cereal pieces as coated as possible, but you don’t want to break them up too much.

Next you need to coat your chocolate covered cereal in powdered sugar. The easiest way to do this is to add 1.5 cups of powdered sugar to a grocery bag (disclaimer: I *always* end up adding more powdered sugar).

Add your cereal on top.

Close up the bag, and start shaking! Every once in a while, I open up the bag and see where I’m at. If it’s all looking like too much chocolate, and not enough powdered sugar, I open up the bag and add a little more.

When you’re satisfied with the powdered sugar coverage, go ahead and dump it all out into a bowl. Normally, I’d spend more time getting a better coating than this, but I was impatient and ready to start picking at the puppy chow. Not to mention running late!