So you're shacked up at home in Palm Springs with the kids for Super Bowl weekend instead of heading to the game? No problem. Here are a couple recipes you can make in preparation for the big game on Sunday that are simple enough to get the kids involved with, too.
Haystacks
2 cups Chow Mein Noodles
1 cup butterscotch chips
1/2 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup cashews or pecans chopped
1/2 cup miniature marshmallows
Directions: Put the butterscotch chips and peanut butter together in a bowl and put in the microwave on 50% power, stirring every 2 minutes until melted. Line a baking sheet with waxed paper. Once the butterscotch mixture is melted, add the rest of the ingredients to the bowl. Mix together and then drop by spoonfuls onto the waxed paper. Allow to harden at room temperature for approximately 30 minutes. Done!
We love making Haystacks as a game day treat. They aren't messy and are small enough that young kids can hold them without too much trouble.
Cracker pizzas are on the weekend game day rotation throughout football season here at our house, but when it comes to Super Bowl weekend, we like to bump them up a notch with a variety of pizza toppings aside from the standard pepperoni slices. If you set out the ingredients beforehand in bowls, you can let the kids each make a dozen or so of their own creative concoctions in an assembly line fashion to speed the preparation process up.
Cracker Pizzas
1 box of Triscuit Crackers
1 jar of pizza sauce
1 bag of mozzarella cheese
various pizza toppings such as diced up green olives, green chilies, pepperoni, Canadian bacon and crumbled cooked sausage
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Line up rows of the crackers on a jelly roll pan or cookie sheet. Next, spoon pizza sauce onto each cracker. Add your choice of toppings next. For this part, you can mix and match the toppings so that there is a little bit of variety. Now, add the mozzarella cheese to the top of each cracker. Bake in the oven for 5-7 minutes, or until cheese is melted. Serve on a platter.
Adding the cheese last helps create a pocket to enclose the pizza toppings into so that they don't tend to fall off the top of the pizza as you go in for a bite. The cheese melts and molds itself around the ingredients. This is also good for when you have pizza toppings that tend to be on the greasy side of the spectrum (sausage and pepperoni come to mind). Instead of having an unappetizing pool of orange colored grease lingering on top of the cheese, it tends to soak into the sauce and cracker below, when the cheese is added last.
Here's a fun factoid for you. Super Bowl XXIV holds the title for the most touchdowns during a Super Bowl game by one team. In the game between San Francisco and Denver, San Francisco scored a total of eight touchdowns, the most in Super Bowl history!
Shannon Duffy is the Palm Springs Parenting Editor and co-author of The Couples Guide to Pregnancy & Beyond, Stormy Knight: Prom Queen of the Undead and If You Wore the Uniform... You're a Brown! Volume 1. Have a topic or event you’d like covered? Just send her an email at parentingeditor@yahoo.com
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