Necessity is the mother of invention. Or annoyance. Or disappointment.
FreshDirect, as you may know, makes a trail mix they call Rainbow Delight. It's raisins, peanuts, sunflower seeds, cashews, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, and of course -- the source of the rainbow -- M&M-like candy.
Due to a shortage of some sort, there was a period of time when some bags, packed in some factory, replaced the rainbow candies with plain chocolate chips.
Oh. No.
So while we wrote to customer service and waited out the great rainbow drought of 2013 (the M&Ms have since been re-instituted), I made my own snack mix.
It doesn't have a name yet, but it's red. It's sweet and salty and -- something relatively new to the snack mix game -- a little squishy.
So what's in it? It's a mix of unsalted cashews, chocolate-covered raisins (I also tried blueberries, but raisins are more than sufficient), dried cranberries, salted peanuts, and freeze-dried strawberries.
It's a summery snack mix and sort of sexy, too.
I know this is true because recently in Paris I found that Pierre Hermé had his own version, based on his famous Ispahan rose-raspberry-litchi macaron.
His version is a little more refined, but that's not always what you want in your pre-meeting food grab.