It was a nutty day around here today!

We often both have a bowl of cereal for a snack or a quick breakfast - but what about taking that cereal and using it in a new way? One of our favorite cereals is the peanut butter flavored Cap'n Crunch - so what else could we do besides adding it to a bowl and covering it with milk? We ground it up and transformed it into these Peanut Butter Cereal Cookies!

To keep the cereal from getting greasy or clumpy when it is ground in the food processor, a portion of the flour from the recipe is added to absorb any moisture that may come out. You don't want to add all of the flour as it might prevent the cereal from getting ground fine enough. Using the cereal brings a rich peanut flavor without having to overload the cookie with fat from using lots of peanut butter. While you could use smooth peanut butter, we opted for the chunky variety as those bits of peanuts added a nice texture and another layer of flavor. Using all brown sugar gave these cookies a kind of sticky chewiness - it also allows them to stay soft and not have that crumbly or sandy texture that some peanut butter cookies do. With those classic crosshatched marks on top, these cookies are staying put in the house as Jeff and I will certainly make short work of them!

It seems that it must be peanut day around here as the nuts wiggled their way into tonight's unique dinner of Saté Burgers. This recipe takes the flavors of the skewered meat with the dipping sauce and melds them into a large juicy burger. A mixture of ground pork and turkey keeps the burgers relatively lean, but there is enough fat between the two to keep the burgers from drying out. Incorporated into the meat is fresh chopped cilantro, chopped peanuts, sweet brown sugar, tangy lime juice, fish sauce for a salty edge, ground cumin, minced garlic and a few drops of cayenne pepper sauce for heat.

You could combine all of the ingredients and form the burgers ahead of time so all you would need to do is grill them up when you are ready to eat - but they did hold together exceptionally well and didn't fall apart when we cooked them right away. Keeping the twist going on these untraditional hearty burgers, we opted not to place them on a bun and instead served them over a bed of nutty brown basmati rice and tender baby spinach. I only made enough rice for tonight though, so I think we'll have these on some crunchy toasted English muffins for lunch tomorrow!

Recipes
Peanut Butter Cereal Cookies
Saté Burgers