Selection Sunday Snack Mix

I live in a house full of boys. This is a therapeutic rant for me today as my husband, Adam, has declared next Sunday a "man holiday." Is anyone else a college basketball fan? March 11 is "Selection Sunday," when the brackets are picked to pave the road for the college Final Four basketball tournament. This means that every TV in the house will be tuned to a sports channel, we will be surrounded by sports newspapers and we will be Googling statistics on ALL the teams so that Adam can break down the teams for his bracket selections. Me? I will end up picking my bracket by the mascots. Opposites attract!
So...with this coming Sunday being a "man holiday," we will have tons of friends stopping by and we need to have large quantities of easy snacks within reach at all times! I found the perfect recipe to serve, Crispy Glazed Snack Mix. It was super easy to make in large amounts and it only has 6 ingredients! Totally my speed for this Sunday.

Here’s how to make this for the fans in your family: Preheat the oven to 250°F. Take a roasting pan and line it with foil. I wish I could give you a really good technical reason why I did it, however the truth is that the bottom of my pan was so scraped up that I really couldn’t take a picture to show you. It’s one of "those" well-loved pans that gets used for everything so you just keep using it and you tell yourself that you need to get a new one... I sprayed the foil with cooking spray.

Pour in 1 large box of crunchy corn and rice cereal in the roasting pan and set aside.
Take out a 3-quart saucepan and melt 1 cup butter over Medium to High heat.

Then add in 2 cups brown sugar and 1/8 teaspoon salt.

Pour in 1/2 cup light corn syrup and start stirring up the mixture! Stir continuously until it starts to boil.

It should take only about 8-9 minutes to start boiling, so don’t walk away and start multi-tasking! Stay here and stir until it looks like this:

Remove the pan from the heat and add in 1/2 teaspoon baking soda.

As you stir it in, the mixture will start to get light and fluffy. It should look like this:

Then simply pour the mixture right over the cereal in the roasting pan.

Gently toss the mixture so that all the cereal gets coated.

Place in the oven and bake for 1 hour. Set a timer and every 15 minutes gently toss the mixture in the pan so that the cereal continues to get coated as it cooks.

After an hour of baking time, remove from oven and place the snack mix on wax paper to cool.

Just break apart and serve!

I would love for you to see a little bit of the "man holiday" process and how many bowls of the snack mix I usually set out. Then typically two things happen....1. I realize how trashed my house has become during the "man holiday", and 2. The boys tell me I need to move - I am "blocking" the TV, the internet screen or a practice bracket? hmmmm, oh, well. The good news… If I am lucky one of my picks will make a bracket for the day and Crispy Glazed Snack Mix will be the Most Valuable Snack Mix of the day!

I have a feeling it’s going to be a long couple of weeks of non-stop basketball in the house!
Do you have any favorite game time snacks? Try adding Crispy Glazed Snack Mix to your next "man holiday," and let me know how it was received.

Come back in a few days when Amanda will share a dinner idea that comes together in a snap.

Alex is paid to write for the Land O’Lakes Recipe Buzz® Blog.