A Healthy-ish Snack

When I was doing a good job of trying to eat healthier, I decided to take a walnut/pecan mix of nuts to work as a snack.  The thing is....walnuts and pecans taste better in sweet desserts than alone. 

So I decided to take some of the healthy out of the snack and make it a little sweeter.  I'm not using exact measurements here because I pretty much just threw stuff together.  How much you will need depends on the amount of nuts that you use.

This picture shows the snack in a regular cereal bowl.  This was all that I made.

Sweet Walnut & Pecan Snack

Ingredients

• walnuts
• pecans
• butter
• brown sugar
• semi-sweet chocolate chips

1. Melt butter in sauce pan over medium heat.
2. Dissolve brown sugar in the butter.
3. Place walnuts and pecans in a bowl with semi-sweet chocolate chips.
4. Pour butter mixture over nuts and chips.
5. Let cool and store in a sandwich bag for on the go snacking!

This was not overly sweet, but it gave the nuts a little something besides well...nothing.  Enjoy! :)

Caramel Popcorn

Because I'm sure you need another sweet treat to help with your New Year's Resolutions and because I needed to move another recipe over from WordPress, here's my post for today! :)

It doesn't actually taste like caramel, just so you know.  It's sweet and delicious, though!  Scott found this recipe on ehow.com.

Ingredients

• 3 Quarts Popped Popcorn
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup Karo light corn syrup
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• Large mixing bowl
• Sauce pan

1. Pop the popcorn.  Seperate popped kernels from any unpopped ones.  Salt lightly. (I just realized as I was typing this, that I didn't salt my popped popcorn.  It's still good.  So we can say that the salt here is optional.  Also, we have a popcorn popper that is just a hot air popper.  I used 8 tablespoons of unpopped kernels to make approximately 3 quarts of popcorn.)
2. Prepare an area to receive the hot coated popcorn.  Layout approximately 24" x 24" area of wax paper.  Butter thoroughly to prevent the caramel from sticking.  (I sprayed my wax paper liberally with Pam.  That worked well.)
3. In a medium sauce pan, combine brown sugar, corn syrup, butter, and salt.  Bring to a boil over medium heat stirring constantly.  Stop stirring.  Boil for 4 minutes.  Remove from heat and stir in baking soda and vanilla.  The mixture will become foamy.  Stirl until the baking soda is completely dissolved.  (Medium heat was taking too long for me.  The dial on my oven is low, 2, 3, 4, medium, 6, 7, 8, high.  I moved my dial to 7 because it was taking a life time to boil on medium.)
4. Pour mixture over popcorn.  Stir until popcorn is completely coated.  Pour the caramel corn onto the waxed paper.  Allow to cool completely before packing.  (But feel free to sample while it cools because it's really yummy warm!)