Dinner Mayham

Today, the girl who lives next door (Jenna) got her braces off and since she is Maudie's favorite babysitter, we decided to do something nice for her. Chris thought it would be fun to make her a pan of ooey-gooey s'mores bars to celebrate the re-birth of her metal-less smile. So, we picked up Maudie from Kristeen's house, went to the Piggly-Wiggly to get all of the ingredients and hurried home to whip up a batch. Maudie, being the good little helper that she is, helped me carry in a bag of groceries and spotted the mini-marshmallows. I thought it would be pretty harmless to give her a FEW to snack on while dinner was cooking. But when she gets something in her head there is NO changing her mind, and she had her mind set on eating ALL the marshmallows right out of the bag. A few minutes and a few thousand tears later, I got her settled down (minor detail: by giving her the whole darn bag of marshmallows). She only ate a few before she "helped" me toss them into the pot of melted butter, but she ate them with conviction and attitute.
I finished up preparing the bars and formed them into the cake pan while Chirs browned the meat for the last batch of chili for the season (who can eat chili when it's over 70 degrees? Not me). Anyway, we opened all the cans of tomoatoes & beans and dumped them into the cast-iron dutch oven my mother-in-law, Jennie, had given me for Christmas. We put the pot on to simmer and headed over to the neighbors.
While we were there, Jenna showed Maudie her pet miniture hamsters. They have three of them... BoBo, Oreo and Ruby (the albino one). Maudie was in LOVE. Owen, Jenna's brother, lowered BoBo into one of the ball-dealio thingys (technical term) and Maudie scooped it up and planted him right in her lap. Before I knew it we were there 20 minutes or more, but I'm sure everthing is OK, because I turned the chili down to low, right? Or did I?
We walked in the door and smoke was billowing on the celing. My preg-mencia (demencia for the pregnant lady) had gotten the best of this dinner and the pot had been on 'high' for nearly a half an hour. Now, ordianarly I consider myself a pretty good cook however, ever since Jennie gave me this pot, I have not been able to cook one darn thing in it. I think she cursed it. Chris says it still tastes better than her cooking (sorry, Jennie) but I think he's just trying to make me feel better. I must admit, I'm getting pretty good at cleaning the damn thing. I discovered if you make a paste of out baking soda and water, it dissolves off all the black soot on the bottom of the pan with out using steel-wool.
Long story short, we had hotdogs for dinner. At least the bars turned out alright. Please note, the photo of Maudie at the dinner table was not of this meal....it was last week when I burned the tar out of a batch of wild-rice soup.

Here's the recipe for my S'mores bars...
1 stick butter
1 large box of Golden Graham Cereal
1 large bag of mini marshmellows
1/2 sleeve cracked Graham crackers (cracked up to roughly bite-size peices)
3 Hershey bars

Melt the butter in a large pan (avoid dutch oven at all cost) toss in marshmellows reserving a large handfull. Stir until melted (do not take your eyes off this for one minute) add in box of cereal and coat with marshmellow. Add crunched-up/cracked graham crackers & reserved marshmellow, remove from heat & stir. Fold out into a greased (Pam'ed) cake pan. Break Hershey bar into the little sqares and tuck into nook and crannies of the Golden Grahams. Cover with saran-wrap and gently press mixure into pan to condense or use the back side of the butter wrapper.  Wha-la, done. Don't bring these bars anywhere without carrying a copy of the recipe becasue people are going to ask for it!