How To Make Puppy Chow

• 2 packages semi-sweet chocolate pieces
• 1 cup peanut butter
• Rice Chex^TM
• powdered sugar

Melt together chocolate pieces and peanut butter. Pour over Rice Chex and mix well. Place powdered sugar in paper grocery bag, add cereal, and shake to coat.

Transcribed from a recipe written by ten-year-old daughter.

A Pleasant Evening

It is Southern Man's weekend with ten-year-old daughter and we have had a pleasant and not-to-overly-exciting few days. Southern Man "kidnapped" her from school (that is, checked her out a bit before lunchtime) on Friday; after lunch (Chick-Fil-A, her new favorite fast food) she saw a movie (Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief) while Southern Man took the Hyundai to the shop and waited on a necessary repair, and after some shopping and errands we ate a late dinner at Golden Corral. Mmmmm, cheap steak. On Saturday we did a few errands out at The Land (which included fetching a few boxes of DVDs from where they'd been in storage for well over a year, which made daughter quite happy), dropped by her mom's to give her seventeen-year-old sister her birthday presents (ten-year-old daughter had spent a large chunk of her allowance on gifts last visit, and her mom and I went halves on a nice new (and very purple) Dell laptop, and her mom's boyfriend fiancé sprang for the extended warranty) and led daughter's eight party guests in a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday. And then ten-year-old daughter and I spent the rest of the evening watching movies and playing card games (thanks to her grandmother she is something of a shark at gin rummy) and cooking and baking - banana bread, chocolate-chip cookies (with both store-bought and homemade cookie dough), fantasy fudge, and bean soup. The apartment is finally beginning to feel like home.

Southern Man's Fantasy Fudge

Well, it's actually the recipe that's been on the side of the Kraft^TM Jet-Puffed^TM Marshmallow Creme jar forever, but Southern Man saves with the generic stuff which does not have the recipe, so here it is (and not a moment too soon, as the recipe is 404 on Kraft's recipe web site and the aforementioned generic is pushing the name brands right off the shelf):

3 cups of sugar
3/4 cup ( 1 1/2 sticks ) of butter
1 5-oz can of evaporated milk
1 bag ( 12 oz ) of chocolate chips (semi-sweet, dark, or both)
1 teaspoon of vanilla
1 cup or so of roughly chopped nuts (Southern Man uses his dad's native pecans)
1 7-oz jar of marshmallow creme

Open the bag of chips and jar of marshmallow cream; go ahead and put the vanilla in with the cream. Place the sugar, evaporated milk, and butter in a large saucepan. Heat until you reach boiling, then keep at a rolling boil, stirring continuously. After precisely four minutes remove from heat; quickly add the previously opened marshmallow cream, vanilla, chocolate chips, and nuts. Stir well and pour into 9x9 glass dish. Get a glass of milk, sit in front of the TV and scrape the saucepan with a large spoon while the fudge cools. Enjoy!