Green Stuff
As a kid, most of the food my parents made was Greek, and bizarre. Octopus, goat, okra. It all sounds great now, but when you’re 7, it’s not something you want for snack time. When the holidays would come around, my mom would make all these cookies full of clove, and allspice, and anise. I could not handle it. Gross. I longed for the sugar cookies and buckeyes I saw my friends eating. Seeing my despair, and being, like, the best parent ever, my mom took inspiration from the rice krispie treats she saw other parents bring to baseball games and invented a holiday version with corn flakes (because rice krispies are gross and we certainly never had anything that soggy in our cupboards) to cheer me up. I remember making these with her pretty much every year, and it’s the only reason I have green food coloring in my pantry to this day. [Note that I totally made up the part about her developing the recipe. For all I know, she got it out of the TV Guide or something. It feels like too personal a question to ask her.]
Ingredients
- 30 big marshmallows
- 1 stick of butter (unsalted, you monster!)
- 3 cups corn flakes
- 1.5 tbs green food coloring
- Some salt
- Some red hots
Directions
- These are kind of like rice krispie treats, so if you know how to make those, just do it like that.
- Toss the butter and the marshmallows in a pot over low/medium heat. Stir it all till it melts.
- Once it melts, put in the green food coloring and some salt. Stir that up too.
- Now toss in the corn flakes and stir to coat.
- This part gets messy. Put some wax paper on a pan and dump spoonfuls of the mixture onto it in little balls. Make them as big or small as you want. Personally, I like them to be about the size of a golf ball.
- Before they cool, drop a couple of red hots on each one.
- Now, wait an hour or so for them to set.
- The idea, I think, is for them to look like mistletoe or holly or something. Not too convincing, but they taste, well, exactly like you’d expect.