Best Way To Not Bonk
You can buy trail mix at the grocery store or the convenience store. If that's what you like, click here. But there are excellent reasons to make your own. What you eat on the trail should be fresh, enjoyable and provide serious salt and sugar.
Classical trail mix is "good old raisins and peanuts", aka GORP. It supplies basic nutrition but lacks complexity of texture and flavor. When someone added chocolate chips to GORP it went a long way toward improving the recipe. But chocolate chips melt and the product, in our opinion, was still seriously underdeveloped. So we have evolved our own mixture and submit the most recent version here for your consideration.
Sheila and Dale's Excellent Trail Mix
- 16 oz. Planters Salted Dry Roasted Peanuts
- 12 oz. Dark Chocolate M&M's
- 6 oz. Planters Dry Roasted Sunflower Kernels
- 10 oz. SunMaid Raisins
- 5 oz. Good Sense Honey Sesame Sticks
The measurements shown are the actual package sizes. We just dump full packages into a 2.5 gallon Hefty zipper bag and "bag mix" the ingredients. Commercial package sizes change (annoyingly) with some frequency so our recipe is necessarily flexible.
From the big bag we scoop 2 oz. each (easy peasy - approx. 1/3 cup - buy a cheap set of plastic scoops) into sandwich bags. The 2 oz. serving provides around 275 calories and 220 mg sodium. Salt's a good thing on the trail, so save the low sodium for home. Which brings to mind that there are low salt options for peanuts and sunflower seeds on the grocery store shelf. Read the labels and go for the salt.
Notes:
- Excellent Trail Mix freezes nicely for up to a year.
- Recently we saw trail mix described as "chocolate with obstacles". Good one. When in doubt add more M&M's.
- Do not feed Excellent Trail Mix to cute little ground squirrels.
- Do not feed anything to cute little ground squirrels.