We normally go through Archer Farms Monster trail mix at a pretty steady rate, and I’ve been continuing to order it from Target during the pandemic—but in the last few weeks it hasn’t been available for shipping. We tried a few other trail mixes, but no one liked them as much. It occurred to me that I could easily make my own Monster trail mix (I even have an empty Monster trail mix bin I could mix it in), since all the ingredients are easy to buy separately; but I felt like I wanted the guidance of knowing what the original proportions were, rather than winging it. I WAS able to buy it in a smaller, more-expensive-per-ounce bag of it, and I put it aside as a little project for another day. TODAY WAS THE DAY.
I assembled my equipment: a kitchen scale, pen and paper, the bag of trail mix, a paper towel, five little bowls. Did it bother me that two of the bowls were the same color, especially when I own two additional colors of that bowl (pink and yellow)? Yes, but I was not going to lose momentum by waiting for the dishwasher to finish. Plus, then I would have had trouble choosing which five colors of the six I should use. In some ways this was easier: the type of discontent was predestined. A person could PRETEND there were only four colors, and that this was merely a matter of the pattern repeating.
I separated out the ingredients. Left to right: peanuts, mini M&Ms, raisins, chocolate chips, peanut butter chips. (If this task appeals to you, may I recommend a job as a library page?) I had to dump the contents of one bowl back out onto the paper towel so I could tare the scale to the weight of an empty bowl (I could have used a sixth bowl for that, and could have had it in the photo and everything, now I’m bothered again about the bowl colors) (also it bothers me that I put the two darkest things in the darkest bowls, though I don’t regret using the orange bowls for the peanut-related things; but I could have at least put the raisins in green and the M&Ms in purple, well BYGONES). I weighed the five bowls and wrote down the results. I resisted the temptation to ROUND the results, even in cases where HEAVEN ITSELF cried out for rounding (e.g., 101 grams of peanuts, 99 grams of raisins, ARE THEY DELIBERATELY TAUNTING SCIENCE??). I thought back to my biology teacher, who had to tell me to stop tweaking my labs to Look Right and to instead put down THE NUMBERS I ACTUALLY GOT.
My plan was to take little pieces of paper I’d written the weights on, and tuck them into their respective bowls to make a pretty and effective visual aid. As I was stacking the empty bowls, having dumped their contents into the bin and mixed them thoroughly back together, I remembered that that was the plan.
See, I left more room on the bottom half, for tucking into the bowls. Anyway! Here are the numbers, according to this one sample bag! (I am going to order at least one more bag for a double-check; I have to order the unsalted peanuts anyway.)
• unsalted peanuts: 3.6 ounces / 101 grams
• mini M&M’s: 2.7 ounces / 77 grams
• raisins: 3.5 ounces / 99 grams
• chocolate chips (I’m pretty sure milk chocolate): 2.5 ounces / 69 grams
• peanut butter chips: 2.0 ounces / 56 grams
I am going to order the things I don’t have, or get them on my next grocery-shopping trip, and then scale the whole thing up to fit the 36-ounce bin. Also I am going to make the peanuts and raisins the EXACT SAME WEIGHT, and I’m going to make the M&M’s and chocolate chips match each other, too, and I’m going to ROUND TO MY HEART’S CONTENT. If I’m doing this math right, with my adjustments it would be something like:
• unsalted peanuts: 9.25 ounces / 260 grams
• mini M&M’s: 6.5 ounces / 175 grams
• raisins: 9.25 ounces / 260 grams
• chocolate chips: 6.5 ounces / 175 grams
• peanut butter chips: 5 ounces / 140 grams
That comes to 36.5 ounces. But actually, I might want to scale the whole thing down even smaller, like to 30 ounces, because I need room in the bin to shake it all together to mix it, anyway. And also I want to remember to compare the price of making my own versus buying it already made. Well, those will be problems for another day.
[Figuring Out the Proportion of Ingredients in Archer Farms Monster Trail Mix: DO-OVER!]
I love you so hard. I will forever be grateful to Al Gore for inventing the internet so I could find people who I understand.
I have often read and heard Americans talking about “trail mix” and been curious as to what it *actually* is (but clearly not curious enough to just Google it). I was imagining a much more “healthy” thing – dried fruit, various nut, grain, seed type things… Discovering that there is so much chocolate-y stuff in there is a revelation. And better explains why it seems so popular…
French versions of this are indeed wholesome and healthy (brazil nuts, sunflower seeds, dessicated coconut, raisins, hazelnuts, that kind of thing). And while that’s great up to a point, it is only up to a point. Removing the sunflower (or whatever) seeds and adding M&Ms would improve it immeasurably.
There are so many kinds of trail mix! This one is “Monster” trail mix and seems to be aimed at kids; I’m not sure which came first, Monster trail mix or Monster cookies (which are made with M&M’s and some combination of peanut butter, chocolate chips, peanut butter chips, and/or raisins). Other trail mixes are pretty much any combination of nuts, seeds, and dried fruits—sometimes with chocolate chips or chocolate/yogurt-covered raisins for flair. I also like the Sunny Cranberry trail mix, which is dried cranberries, pumpkin seeds, almonds, sunflower seeds, and golden raisins. (The kids are less enthusiastic and prefer the one that’s half candy.)
The Sunny Cranberry Trail mix looks delicious-it’s full of my favorite things! Going to add that to my list of things to buy!
Kirsty, my experience of trail mix is the same as yours, and I live in Canada. I suspect that the expectations of what would be part of it depend partly on location, but also partly on your parents’ views on what “trail mix” should be. I had a mom who was a hippie back in the day, and fed us unsweetened yogurt with wheat germ on it, and robust, grainy cereals, and a dad who came from Scotland and was raised at a time that raisins were a sweet treat. Also, to be fair, we only ate trail mix on, well, trails when hiking, so anything chocolate or candy-like would have melted into a big mess.
As an adult I don’t think I’ve bought trail mix, though we do get some types of nuts and dried fruit individually for snacking.
I suspect that when I was growing up (1970s Britain, a bleak and dreary place by all accounts), there was no such thing as “trail mix” of any kind. You could get bags of salted peanuts, but I’m not sure much else would have been available. My mother was Scottish too, and was very much of the porridge-made-with-salt-and-water (which I wouldn’t eat, I would only eat porridge made by my dad because he used milk and put honey on it), raisins-are-a-treat school too (although not even remotely hippie, think more puritanical upbringing in poverty). I don’t actually remember snacks of any kind, except maybe custard cream biscuits on very special occasions, otherwise (the I hope ironically-named) “nice” biscuits or (even worse, for a kid anyway) Digestive biscuits. Savoury snacks were only ever crisps (“chips” in the US, don’t know about Canada) or salted (very, very salted) roasted peanuts. As I said, it was a bleak and dreary place! There certainly wasn’t much chocolate involved in snacks (or life in general, for that matter, except at Easter and Christmas). All the information I’ve read here about trail mix is making me much more enthusiastic about the idea of it – I buy dried apricots, and occasionally pistachios, but have never put together an actual “mix”, but now I might just try and develop my own! (There would be chocolate in it for sure, but right now, it’s 32°C so I don’t think that would be a great idea. In winter, however…)
Oh–but when you have chocolatey trail mix in summer, some of the bits melt together, and then resolidify. Then you get a nice nutty chocolatey cluster to eat all at once. It’s lovely.
There are a wide range of trail mixes available in the US, from those with lots of candy etc to those with just nuts and seeds and maybe dried fruit. The sweet/salty and carbs/protein balance is great for hiking and long bike rides IMO – gives you a burst of energy but also fills you up a bit.
This only makes me love you more! What a worthwhile project. I cannot wait to see the results of the price comparison.
I saw someone compare the price of store-bought granola vs. homemade granola, and ever since, I have been making my own. It’s kind of a pain, takes a while, but on one shopping trip (Trader Joe’s), I can get enough for two batches; each batch is about 8 cups. It lasts me quite a while, because I don’t let anyone eat it. Selfish, I know, but I’m gluten free and THEY have plenty of other things they can eat that are NOT gluten free. PLUS, I have tweaked the recipe to my preferences and it is perfect.
Yeah, I can make a ridiculous amount of granola (6 cups oats, sometimes some nuts – kids, school, not always allowed) for like $3 – that’s rounding math pretending it costs me the entire giant thing of oats to make it, but I think I can actually get 2 batches out of those and they cost me $2.50, max). 8oz can cost $6 (even the cheap stuff, 8oz is like $3, I get way more than that).
I find a lot of stuff is that way. The will to make it is the thing.
I 100% love that you did this, and was excited when I saw the picture of the setup and knew where this was going. I hope yours turns out well! We have tried the caramel cashew mix at your suggestion and were big fans!
I love this so much. I love this so much.
My favorite trail mix is “Indulgent” from Walmart. It seems so well-priced, I’m not sure I could put it together for less, but I’m motivated to put out the bowls and discover the recipe just in case Something Happens.
Alright, full disclosure here: I’m motivated to do it for the fun of it.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend where she wasn’t able to see the difference between her temperament and mine. To clarify, I asked this question: “Which would rather do: Organize and direct a church event … or sort 5,000 beads by color, shape, and size?” Unsurprisingly, she cut me off at the phrase “organize and direct a church event” with “THAT! I want THAT!”
Also unsurprisingly, I’d rather sort the beads. In fact, I’d sort them even if it weren’t the only way to avoid the church event.
HA!
I’m with you. Although if an event can be organized and directed without me actually being *visible* then maybe.
That does remind me that I have some beads to sort, though…
Is it wrong that I kind of want to buy a bunch of random beads now, for the sole purpose of sorting them in different ways? It sounds so SOOTHING.
I would gladly do either, although I’d vastly prefer the beads. What, pray tell, do all you sort-y people who aren’t library pages do for a living? I need a new career…
It depends on whether you need to *personally* restore things to order or whether it is adequately satisfying to simply be involved in the process and know that your efforts will be enacted by others, but if the latter, many varieties of QA can work out well. Spot the thing out of order! Or the missing bit! Or the part that’s upside down! Or the error in this record! (but, usually, report it rather than getting to personally fix it, sigh)
I’m in tech and am a weirdo for loving debugging other peoples’ code, but I also especially enjoy doing data transformation (converting things from one format to another). The process has distressing parts (the part in the middle sometimes where you go “this data has more problems with it than I thought” – and sometimes due to time/funding constraints you can’t make it all perfect), but has an absolutely enormous amount of chaos-to-order in it.
Archivists also do a lot of mystery/chaos to catalogued/preserved, although that’s a highly intellectually-involved process and is less soothing to many people than things that simply *have* an alphabetical ordering and you *put* them in it and you’re *done* and that’s it. (but archives also often have pages, if you want to be a page and there is an archive near you! It will look different from the Swistle Job, though.)
Some people who like the sorting of things do well with working on the back end of smaller shipping concerns (I have yet to hear of a happy Amazon employee, but there exist non-abusive corporations), or with store inventory or stocking, or with being the person who re-folds all.the.shirts in stores, but I don’t know enough about each of those to know the contours in relation to bead-sorting and library paging and I am fairly sure they are not well-paid nor as good of work environments as most libraries.
Or, if you do like organizing people and events, there might be a career for you somewhere in child enrichment activities or occupational therapy or similar, where you could do the people/activity stuff for most of the day, and then pack away all the multitude of displaced objects at the end of the day. (ahhh) I did a stint when I was a teenager with a nursery that had a bleach-wipe-everything-and-put-the-toys-away policy after all the kids left. It was *surprisingly* good for calming the brain when the small children had been a bit… chaotic. Silence, alone [introvert], during a restoration of order, then click off the light and leave and take the bus home.
I also did a teenage internship thing where one of my major duties was sorting files (the things were mostly in the right folders, but had to be 1. checked and 2. date-sorted); filing clerks, I think, are usually more focused on “putting each new thing in the right place” rather than “going through the entire filing cabinet and re-sorting everything” but that might be a pleasing option, still. (I also have my suspicions that paralegals do a fair bit of chaos-to-order-ing.)
Good luck and happy career-sorting!
I’ve long considered paralegal. Maybe worth revisiting. I’m in education now. It’s exhausting.
Education has a lot of reasons to be exhausting, but it might be good to assess your specific reasons and see if a lateral move might remove some of the dead weight? But also, yes, talk to paralegals and find out about training and such! It’s just that sometimes when people are burned out in education, they are burned out because of the administration, or because of some feature specific to their job as it is but which is not a necessary component, and thus identifying whether you could trade slightly-lower pay or a slightly-longer commute or otherwise something that is an acceptable trade for you, to have a job you’re already trained for and that isn’t exhausting. (I should note, partly this is my standard advice for people who have training in one field already, *but* also I am selfishly wanting as many competent people to stay in education as possible and broadly assume that most of the Swistle Populace are competent people. And also lots of times there aren’t lateral-move options, or no, a lateral move wouldn’t fix the problems with the job. But I’ve known a couple of people who were deeply unhappy in their jobs, considering drastic career shifts, and then found out… they could work with a different team instead! And when the interpersonal problems were gone, they enjoyed their actual work again! So, potentially worth considering.)
That is such good career advice!! The true problem is that I’m in early childhood education and I’ve maxed out my earning potential and I’m a single parent. And unfortunately even an incredibly well paid early childhood educator simply does not make enough money to be a single income household and be able to do things like have a retirement fund or occasionally go on a small vacation. The only way to make it work is to have a full-time job and a part-time job and I just cannot do that anymore while I’m also raising two small children. It’s just a problem with the industry standard.
Yep, that sounds like Paralegal Time. Early childhood education can be *great* for people who don’t need it to produce a large income, but… yeah. Unless there’s a very pricey private school that also pays teachers really well (the two… do not always go together) in your area that you might be able to get into, then yes, moving to something else makes sense.
(and yes. It is a huge problem with the industry standard. “You want to make a difference in absolutely vital areas of our society? Here! We will pay you almost nothing while draining you dry daily! You can live on passion and ramen and daily-witnessed injustice, right? And you’ll just work until you die, so you won’t need retirement!” Social workers, public school teachers, etc. It is Not Okay.)
I make a trail mix that’s 2 cups of walnuts, cashews, raisins + 1 (scant) cup sunflower seeds + 1 bar dark chocolate cut into pieces. I splurge on the chocolate and tell myself its healthy. I accidentally bought the wrong cashews through instacart and have been grumbling my way through it. Apparently I have strong views on how soft/crunchy a cashew should be.
Trail mix, it’s SCIENCE! STEM credit for everybody in the kitchen!!!
Love the bowl colour mentions, it would totally bother me!
I love that combo! I don’t think I’ve ever tried it. Here is our family’s go-to travel snack/trail mix: One big jar of regular peanuts, one big box of raisins, one giant bag of peanut butter M&M’s. Not as scientific as your measurements, obviously.
What kind of bowls are those?
French Bull 4-inch melamine mini-bowls. I lovvvvvvvvve them. But they do break surprisingly easily: as I was opening up my second set (ordered because of my intense love for my first set), I dropped one on a wood floor and it just SHATTERED. I would not have expected that from melamine. Later, one of the kids was unloading the dishwasher and dropped one—and it too shattered. I would have expected melamine to basically bounce.
I am never going to do this or probably even eat it (I don’t think you can even get peanut butter chips in New Zealand). But I loved reading this, and that is why I love you, Swistle.
I’ve seen them in Australian Woolworths recently, so maybe they’ve made their way to NZ too? It was in the baking section.
I’m dying to hear Paul’s reaction to this project. I feel like this would be something he will embrace. If I walked into the kitchen and saw my husband doing this… I would have probably taken the pictures for him. Photographic evidence that the other spouse is crazier is fantastic. 😂 So much of marriage seems to be embracing the other person’s whimsy and letting them revel for as long as they want in their side projects (or until the kids mock them into another project.)
Well I love this mix and bought it a few weeks ago. One container had regular M and M’s and one had mini m and m’s.
SO FREAKING ANNOYING!!!
I like to dig through the container hunting for m and m’s and the chips. And you can’t dig around for the minis.
YES. It used to be regular-size M&M’s; then for awhile we were sometimes getting containers with a MIX of regular and mini M&M’s, and now this one was all minis. We wondered if it had anything to do with the way our grocery stores seem to be offering fewer selections in every department: maybe stores are narrowing to regular and peanut M&Ms, so the minis are nice and cheap for trail-mix manufacturers to buy!
Are you planning to use regular or minis when you make your own? I wonder how much of a difference that would make in the composition by weight- it seems like you would end up with fewer M&M’s in total, which just seems wrong…
I asked the children, and they vote for minis, so I’m going to do that—but if I later have trouble getting the minis (or if I get a good clearance price on holiday regular ones, if we ever shop again), I’ll substitute the regular ones. I also kind of want to experiment with CARAMEL M&Ms.
I wouldn’t bother sizing down in hopes that it will mix well in the container. I mix up kosher salt, pepper, and granulated garlic for a chicken recipe we like and in a 3oz jar with an inch of room at the top I swear it never gets properly mixed! >< Starting with a large bowl to mix it all in before pouring into the container may save you that aggravation.
Oh yes, I think mixing it in a bowl first is a GREAT idea. Then if you have a little too much for the container, well, you should test it. Or put some in a small container and hide it, I mean, store it somewhere else.
I’ve made Trader Joe’s monkey business. It started because they stopped carrying it so I had to eyeball the amounts. I would have much preferred to weigh the ingredients so the amounts would be precise.
TIL i would like being a library page :D
oooooohhh. I love me a good sorting project. Y’all are my kind of people. I have still have my daughter’s small toys in random boxes from the move that need to be sorted and put together. I feel I must do this before taking them to the thrift store. It is a bit of angst between my husband and me who would like to just see the boxes gone.
I once spent an afternoon sorting by genre and then alphabetically my in-laws extensive vhs movie collection. Obviously this was years ago. They thought I was crazy but the randomness of their shelving was driving me crazy.
When I was a kid my 2 ideas for what I wanted to be when I grow up were librarian and archeologist. I have often regretted not doing either of these.
Lastly I love that you are going to get a second bag to see if the proportions hold up. I love everything about this project. Can’t wait to get further updates!
Semi on topic: I LOVE peanut butter chips and you just reminded me that we are OUT so next time I’m at the grocery it’s on my list.
This is the type of scientific exploration that I live for. My favorite trail mix is the Trader Joe’s Omega mix. Sprouts does a similar mix, but it’s not exactly the same. No one else in my house will eat it, because they all hate walnuts. Their loss.
This is the happiest thing I’ve read since an article about zoo penguins going for walks.
Thank you, Swistle, for keeping me going.
But have you tried Target’s caramel trail mix? I forget what it is called, but it is amazing.
I think both Costco and sam’s have very similar mixes to the monster mix, they are just missing peanut butter chips.
I am so sad because my youngest has a nut allergy, and I love, love, love trail mix. I’ve had to give it up because he’s young enough I’m concerned he could get a dropped piece and not understand, but I totally look forward to indulging again some day. (My mom always gives us a “treat bag” for Christmas, and I always loved a giant sam’s club bag of trail mix. Good thing my little guy is cute!!)
Mini grocery update, if you’re interested: my store in Central MA was out of Shake-and-bake type boxes and baked beans, and had very, very limited egg noodles. How random!
I am ALWAYS INTERESTED!
Lol, me too :)
I love this almost as much as the Sees candy posts of yore. Related to trail mix…at the ripe old age of 39.9 years old I just learned that gorp = GORP = good old raisins and peanuts. Mind blown.