I grew up eating muddy buddies, a.k.a. puppy chow, and this pairing with “Community” is one of the first ideas I came up with when I started Veg Out.

Unlike the puppy chow I grew up with, my recipe is vegan, making roughly 6 “servings.” The bonus ice cream recipe makes approximately 2 pints, or 6-8 “servings.”

Muddy Study Buddies Ingredients
6 cups vegan multi-grain square cereal
1 cup dark chocolate tahini
1 cup creamy peanut butter
1 cup powdered sugar

Optional Ice Cream Ingredients
1.5 cups almond milk
11.2 ounces vegan vanilla creamer
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
0.25 cups sugar

Muddy Study Buddies Instructions
Pour the cereal into a large bowl that has a secure lid. (Note that while the popular brand of this cereal may appear to be vegan, it has sugar and vitamin D3 that are made with animal by-products.)

Pour the chocolate tahini and peanut butter into a microwave-safe bowl. Microwave in 30-second increments, stirring until they are melted and mixed.

Pour the melted mixture on top of the cereal. Stir the mixture in, making sure each piece of cereal is coated.

Let it cool to room temperature (don’t let it get completely hard) and then pour in the powdered sugar.

Put the lid on your bowl and shake it up so the powdered sugar coats everything.

Let it harden the rest of the way before eating.

Enjoy your muddy study buddies on their own or on top of a bowl of ice cream!

Ice Cream Instructions
If you’re going to make the optional ice cream, you need to start there if you have an ice cream maker that requires your ingredients to be prepped 24 hours ahead of time.

Pour the ice cream ingredients into your blender and pulse until they’re evenly mixed.

What happens next depends on your ice cream maker. If you have a more standard one, you’ll pull your chilled (for 24 hours) bowl out and make the ice cream.

If you have one like mine, you pour the mixture into the pints then freeze them for 24 hours. After that time, you put the pint into your ice cream maker and let it do its magic.

Add a quarter cup of muddy buddies in there at the end of a normal ice cream maker’s cycle or using the mix-in setting if you have one like mine.

We had some extra room in ours, so when it was all done, I put a core of extra muddy buddies down the middle in one of my pints.

If you’re going for the ice cream option, make sure you’ve given your muddy buddies enough time to cool so they’re not warm when they get mixed into the ice cream.

Serve the ice cream with a few extra muddy study buddies on top, then enjoy while you watch an episode of “Community!”

The Easy Route
The easiest route in this case would be to find a premade vanilla ice cream and premade muddy buddies. With the muddy buddies, that may be difficult to find in vegan form.

The Pairing
“Community” is kind of a magical show, in that it served as the breakout role for five actors: Donald Glover, Danny Pudi, Yvette Nicole Brown, Gillian Jacobs and Allison Brie.

The show opens with Jeff (Joel McHale) starting a study group in an effort to get closer to Britta (Jacobs). Troy (Glover), Abed (Pudi), Shirley (Brown), Annie (Brie) and Pierce (Chevy Chase) round out the other Greendale Community College students who join the group.

I love the wild tangents the show goes on, just like how we can all go down rabbit holes when meeting with classmates or coworkers. But since it’s a TV show, “Community” goes further quite often, from a pillow fort that takes over the campus to the exploration of alternate realities.

One of the main drivers in these outlandish plots is Abed, who is probably the character I relate to the most on the show.

He is a film student, and I binge watched this show for the first time right after I left college and had one of my most intense cinephile eras. Abed, played perfectly by Pudi, has a hard time relating to his peers and gets lost in thinking about the world around him like it’s a movie or TV show.

The result is some very meta episodes of “Community,” and I absolutely love it. My favorite manifestation of this is probably the claymation episode, as it reminded me of all the holiday claymation specials I was raised on and still love to this day.

I also deeply love the friendship between Abed and Troy, and all the hijinks they get up to as classmates, roommates, friends and co-hosts of “Troy and Abed in the Morning.”

Glover demonstrates his true star power for the first time in this show, and I will continue to watch his career because of the strong impression he left on me as Troy. My favorite Troy moments are in the episode that features LeVar Burton playing himself.

Really, though, the strength of this show lies in its immensely talented ensemble, from all the folks I listed above to other recurring players like Jim Rash as the Dean and Ken Jeong as Señor Chang. They all play off of each other incredibly well.

If you decide to make muddy buddies (with or without ice cream) and/or watch “Community,” let us know! Tag us in your Instagram posts & stories, threads, tweets or TikTok videos: @veg_out_recipes