Pretzel Mixes

First, a house update for those of you scoring along at home: we have finished replacing the carpeting with wood laminate flooring in four out of the five rooms we are doing. The fifth room is prepped and ready to go (as in carpet and padding removed, tack strips/staples/baseboards removed, and walls freshly painted) but it's a big room so we've been waiting until we have a solid weekend to devote to doing the floor. We also still have to do a few closets (wanted to save those for last so we could try to use up scrap) and all of the baseboards (we are going to hire someone to do those for us after many frustrating failed attempts to install them ourselves without gaps). Then there are some various to-do's left, like hanging some framed items that are either new or things we took down when we painted. It still feels like our list of things to do is about a million items long, but at least it's been shortened from the ten million it felt like we started with! Someday I will share pictures here of the fruits of our labor.

Okay so onto the food. Recently I tried two different recipes for pretzel mixes: one sweet, and one savory. I think they were both from allrecipes.com, where I was searching for a recipe to use up the rest of a big bag of pretzels. The sweet one was interesting, but I probably wouldn't make it again. I made it because I saw the recipe and was intrigued. The savory one was delicious. I made it because when I saw the recipe I immediately thought "My dad would like that!" So I made some and sent it off to him in a container for his birthday.

(The photo above is of the sweet mix, but the savory one pretty much looked just like it: stuff baked onto mini pretzels!)

Here are the recipes:

Cinnamon Bun Pretzel Mix

1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 egg white
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/3 cup pecans or walnuts, roughly chopped
4 to 5 cups miniature pretzel twists

Preheat oven to 275 degrees F and line a baking sheet with sides with parchment paper. (I used a jelly roll pan.) Combine brown sugar and ground cinnamon; set aside. Whisk egg white in large bowl. Add dried cranberries and nuts. Stir. Add miniature pretzels. Sprinkle with brown sugar mix and gently fold until combined, being careful not to crush the pretzels. Spread onto prepared baking sheet. Bake for 45 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes. Remove from oven and stir, evenly distributing nuts and berries. Spread in a single layer to cool completely.


Bar Stool Pretzels

1 cup butter
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
2 tablespoons garlic powder
1 envelope dry onion soup mix
1 dash Tabasco
20 ounces of miniature pretzels

Preheat oven to 250 degrees F. Melt butter in saucepan. Stir in the next four ingredients. Coat pretzels in mixture and spread onto baking sheet with sides. Bake for 1 hour, stirring every 15 minutes. Cool completely.