Cooking with Teenagers: Rice Krispy Treats as a Coping Mechanism

The kids and I have been spending almost all of our school days in the kitchen for the past month, after a quick New Year job of retiling the main shower turned into a month so far of workers with power tools and a fondness for the Steve Miller Band demolishing and rebuilding quite a lot of our main bathroom, walk-in closet, and family room. 

All we've got left is replacing the bathroom floor, and drywalling and painting the family room and bathroom--oh, and retiling the shower!

It turns out that when you're hanging out in the kitchen all day every day, feeling discombobulated and edgy because you hate having strangers (even strangers with terrific taste in music) in the house and you hate having all the furniture and crap from half the house moved into the other half of the house to make it all messy and you especially hate having all your books disorganized on the floor and you REALLY especially hate when a worker comes in and asks you a trick question like which way do you want the new bamboo floor boards to run or how you want the bathroom floor tiles laid out as if you even know something like that (do you want to know my secret trick? I ask the guy what he thinks, and whatever he says, that's what I tell him we should do)...

Yeah, when you're doing all that, and you've got a constant backache from sitting on an uncomfy kitchen stool and you're also, you know, still stressed out about getting Covid, you and your teenagers sometimes get the brilliant idea to buy a bunch of sugar cereal and spend half an afternoon making gourmet Rice Krispy Treats.

Pro tip: the absolute best Rice Krispy Treat recipe is literally the one on the back of the Rice Krispies box. It's important to add extra mini marshmallows in with the cereal, though:

We made a standard version, then we made a version with red food coloring and red sprinkles, then we made a version with peanut butter cereal, then we made a version with peanut butter cereal, m&ms, and chocolate chips, then we made a version with Fruity Pebbles and Froot Loops. These are all that are left at the moment, though:

Like, I know you CAN do some super educational stuff with Rice Krispy Treats, but tbh I mostly just keep thinking about that time that we took Luna to the Kentucky Horse Park and it turned out that she was terrified of draft horses, so every time she saw one and opened her mouth to bark I stuffed her face full of peanut butter instead.

In other news, I just found this on my public library's website:

• Treat Yourself! How to Make 93 Ridiculously Fun No-Bake Crispy Rice Treats

Because the way things are going, we've got at LEAST another month of distracting ourselves with sugar ahead of us...