In Which I Ignore My Own Guidelines

Several years ago I wrote a little set of guidelines for giving gifts to teachers. (You can find it here.) One of the things I suggested was not preparing food for teachers. Or, rather, I cautioned that some teachers might not eat homemade treats. This is still true, but this year we have a lot of people we wanted to do some small holiday recognition for and making something edible just seemed like the best way to go.

AND I have a snack mix recipe that has always been a huge it, so I feel pretty confident that anyone who likes a little something sweet will either enjoy it or know someone who will happily take it off his/her hands. 

The thing is, we will do a nicer/bigger gift for our children's main teachers. But, especially in Harper's case, I don't want to leave anyone out. Because of all the people who are part of our allergy plan at school I get a very concrete sense of the whole, "it takes a village," thing. We have 11 people we are bringing something to at Harper's school. And then you add the neighbors we usually give a little sweet to and Michael's 4 teachers and you have, well, A LOT of people to provide a gift for.

Don't get me wrong - I LIKE recognizing these people and thanking them for the jobs they are doing (or for being great neighbors!), so I'm not complaining, just noting, that I had a lot of people to make snack mix for!

I'm also really enjoying my new camera and this was a good excuse to take pictures of stuff.

Here are the ingredients:

This recipe pretty much had me at butter and brown sugar...

 So you mix the dry ingredients in a roasting pan, then melt the sugar, syrup, and butter together and stir it for a very long time (lots of standing at the stove, this is a recipe that needs tending). Then you add the vanilla and baking soda, dump it over the dry stuff, stir and put it in the oven. Then you stir it at fifteen minute intervals for about an hour. Finally you dump it out to cool and it looks like this:

You will spend the next half-hour or so waiting for it to cool enough to be put into a container or gift bags/boxes. During this time you will need to stand guard and shoo away little children who will repeatedly enter the kitchen looking for, "Just one piece, please?!" And you will have to say no, because each batch will only yield four of these:

One down, nineteen to go.

I made four batches yesterday and then ran out of butter. Matt went to the store today and restocked my supplies - I will have another marathon day this week or next weekend and then we should be all set. That is, until it is time to bake cookies!

Yummy, sugary, goodness!