All Things Marshmallow

A long time ago, I used to love marshmallows. One day that changed. Actually one night it changed: We were having a bonfire one summer night outside of Raymond on Steve’s grandpa’s alfalfa field. We shot fireworks off mortar-style and played Chubby Bunnies. The idea of the game (other than retching marshmallows) is to have someone count, while everyone pops a marshmallow in their mouths at each count and say “Chubby Bunnies!” and the last person to still articulate “Chubby Bunnies” wins. I had to give up at 16 marshmallows and Ranae, my girlfriend at the time won, as she was still able to say “Shubbby Buh-knees” at 21. I teased her that she had a competitive disadvantage and she was mad at me for intimating that she had a big mouth. That night I was losers all around. My girlfriend was mad at me, I didn’t win the game, and worst of all I hated the taste of marshmallows forever after. Something about gagging on marshmallows for 20 minutes did it for me for the rest of my life.

I don’t like marshmallows, but there was a sale on them earlier this summer the store had these industrial sized, small rodent-killing, HUGE marshmallows on sale in an equally massive bag and for some strange reason I decided that they were too good to pass up. I arrived home to find that there were already 3 normal-sized bags of marshmallows that others had decided to buy thinking we needed them for S’mores or something. Long story short, we got too many mmmmarshmmmmallows in the house and need to use them up.

Therefore, while everyone was gone to Banff last week, I whipped up a batch of Rice Krispie Treats to use them up and have something for the nieces and nephew to munch on when they got home. I looked up the recipe at www.ricekrispies.com  and made some up. I added some leftover colored chocolate from last Christmas, added a cup of craisins on a whim and topped them with some sprinkles for good measure. Colorful and yummy!

Tonight I was talking with my sister Barb and we thunked up a great addition to the recipe. I suggested we should add chocolate like before but maybe add graham cracker crumbs or something. Barb countered that we should add Golden Grahams instead. So we did. Man, were they ever good.

Original Rice Krispies Treats

Ingredients
3 Tablespoons butter or margarine (I used margarine)
1 package (about 40) regular marshmallows
6 cups Rice Krispies cereal
1 cup craisins (optional)
½ cup chocolate wafers, chopped (optional)

Directions
In a large saucepan, melt butter over low heat. Add marshmallows and stir until completely melted. Remove from heat.
Add Rice Krispies. Stir until well coated. Add craisins and chocolate if desired.
Using buttered spatula evenly press mixture into 9x13 pan coated with cooking spray. (I keep the foil rectangles from the margarine squares in the fridge, take one out and grease the pan with it)
Cool. Cut into 2-inch squares. Best if served the same day.


S'mores Treats

Ingredients
3 Tablespoons butter or margarine (I used margarine)
1 package (about 40) regular marshmallows
3 cups Rice Krispies cereal
3 cups Golden Grahams cereal
1 package Chipits chocolate chips

Directions
In a large saucepan, melt butter over low heat. Add marshmallows and stir until completely melted. Remove from heat.
Add Rice Krispies and Golden Grahams. Stir until well coated. Add craisins and chocolate if desired.
Using buttered spatula evenly press mixture into 9x13 pan coated with cooking spray. (I keep the foil rectangles from the margarine squares in the fridge, take one out and grease the pan with it)
In a double-boiler, melt the chocolate chips until pourable and drizzle all over the marshmallow mixture.
Cool. Cut into 2-inch squares. Best if served the same day.


Rice Krispies Treats are not my favorite, not by a long shot. I got to thinking about what my favorite marshmallow treat was and I remembered these butterscotch marshmallow squares that they use to make when I was working in the oilfield. I used to spend most of a lot of winters buried in the bush. We would be hours from the nearest town or hotel. There have these camps that are brought in to house the workers. They can be as small as a couple of Atco trailers stuck together with a common kitchen (the worst type), to a typical rig camp which is basically 6 or 7 Atco trailers configured with the kitchen and dining room facilities, rec room and washroom/showers are in the middle with single or double rooms all around the outside. Rig camps will house anywhere from 15 to 24 men, with some companies bringing in additional Atco sleeping trailers to add a few more sleeping berths.

Most often we would book into a huge camp, like a mobile hotel (mobile meaning that over the course of a week, the entire thing could be packed up, torn apart and moved with giant “bed trucks” – which at the end of winter, they often are), catering from anywhere from 50 to 250 men (or rarely women).

As the beds… No, I won’t refer to them as such, they are camp cots, nothing more. They are thin, 3” thick single-sized mattresses that lay in wooden 2x4 frames bolted to the wall. Thin, see-through cotton sheets are all that keep you from touching a mattress that has who-know-who sleeping on it for how-many-years; I’m surprised there is not more reported incidences of bed-bugs or worse. They are rarely over 6 feet long, so a fellow like me who is 6 feet tall and over 300 pounds, my feet hang over, my side not in direct contact with the 2x4 slats that the mattress lays on, but very near it, and usually either the heat is cranked up and you don’t have a thermostat and the window is frozen shut, or you are freezing your tail off and thin, itchy woolen camp blankets become more coveted trading commodities than pork bellies at the Chicago Board of Trade.

Most camps are pretty good these days, but I have slept in a couple that have been in the same place since the 60's. The floors are rotten and you have to be careful where you put your feet. One camp up in the Cameron Hills, NWT only had one room left when we got to camp and they wouldn't let us sleep in it. We tried sleeping in our trucks, but it had dropped below -40 degrees and even with the engines revved up, it wasn't warm enough to sleep in them. We begged them to give us the last room and finally they camp boss relented. There were two bunk beds, but the floor where the heat register was supposed to be had rotted off years ago and the heat vent dropped down somewhere out of sight in the black crawl space as was now presumably a condo for a nest of field mice. Basically, there was no heat for the room. By leaving our door open, we could keep the frost off of us, and between the insulated coveralls and an extra couple of wool blankets we stole, we were able to sleep a little.

On this occasion we were working for a fellow named John Wright. We called him All-Nite Wright. We would work all day on the rig, and then as we were eating supper in camp, he would walk by our table and throw a notepad with a dozen well names on it and tell us to have them done by morning. We had to pull the electronic recorders from about 2500m downhole, download them, rig out and move to the next well. We could knock off a well every three hours, so by 7 AM we had perhaps 6 or 7 done and we were back at camp, grabbing a plate of breakfast to go. Back at the rig, we'd work all day, and then John would stop at our table, asked us how we did the previous night and toss another list at us.

After the fifth day, I thought I would die. I was about to tell John where he could stick his list, when a cold snap hit, we hit -50 below zero and the rig froze up. Now we would work all night, come in for breakfast, report to the rig to find cold water dribbling out of the end of the steam lines and head to our freezing bunks. We would sleep all day, getting paid standby to sleep while the rig was froze up, and then get tossed another list at supper, work all night pulling recorders and running plugs before they suspended the wells. We ended up with something like 225 hours on our paysheet for that two week period.

As all camp beds are basically created more-or-less equal by Atco or one of their competitors, what makes one camp stand out from the other is the food. If you come to breakfast and they have great sandwiches made  up in the cooler for your lunch (please, no ½” thick inedible sausage sammies and never egg-salad, no refrigeration, no dice), bacon that isn’t either boiled and gelatin-like or burned to a crisp, scrambled eggs that aren’t still runny and hash-brown that aren’t convinced that they are still last night’s baked potato (they should at least be fried on the grill long enough to be warm), then chances are, you have a good cook and are staying at a good camp. There isn’t space enough to document all the food poisoning stories I’ve heard or attended and I’ve been at several camps where the rig workers banded together and told the consultant that either there was a new camp cook that night, or we were shutting down the rig and driving home that night, it was his choice. Lo and behold, there was inevitably a new cook slinging grub that next night. A couple of cooks have nearly been lynched. Like something out of a Clint Eastwood movie.

A really good camp would have a baker. He would get up at 3 AM every day and start making bread. Once the dough was rising, he was off making cakes, pies, squares, cookies and there was usually a dozen different offering to add to one’s lunch every day. Other than pie (Mmmmm, pie), my favorites were the ginger snaps at the cookie end of things and butterscotch marshmallow squares. About half the camps would offer some version of the marshmallow squares. Almost all would have Rice Krispie squares or Puffed Wheat Squares or both, but a good one would have those oowey, gooey multi-colored marshmallows covered in butterscotch and peanut buttery goodness. I’m salivating as I’m writing this.

Without further ado, here is my favorite marshmallow treat:
Butterscotch Marshmallow Squares

Ingredients
½ cup butter
1 (11 oz) package butterscotch chips
1 cup peanut butter
1 cup flaked coconut
1 package miniature marshmallows

Directions
In the lower pot of a double boiler, add water halfway to top and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer. In the top of a double boiler, heat butter, butterscotch chips, and peanut butter until melted. Remove from heat.
Once the mixture is cool enough that it won’t melt the marshmallows, stir in coconut and marshmallows.
Pour mixture in buttered pan. Refrigerate and cut into squares. Store in the refrigerator.


I whipped up a batch of these and they were hits. Except with mom. She can't stand peanut butter in any cooking.