For years, Jim’s mom would make amazing toffee bark during the holidays.

It has four ingredients. Two more if you want to get fancy. But the basics are:

• two sticks of butter
• about a sleeve of Saltine crackers
• a cup of sugar
• a bag of chocolate chips

For the butter and the sugar, you just use the plain stuff you have in your kitchen already. For the crackers, even basic, off-brand Saltine-type crackers work great (Kroger had a box for 99 cents. Yes, please!). For the chocolate, you might splurge a little and get posh chips (I’ll explain in a minute).

If you melt the butter in a small saucepan, add the sugar and boil it for five minutes (stirring constantly), pour that mess on crackers spread evenly on a baking sheet, bake it for five minutes at 400, turn off the oven, sprinkle the chocolate chips on the confection, return it to the oven for two minutes, spread the now-melted chips, and pop it all into the refrigerator to firm up, you will have achieved culinary alchemy.

If you want to get fancy you can add chopped pecans before it goes into the refrigerator and/or powdered sugar after it comes out and you break it into shards. I added pecans because I like them and also to hide the fact that my regular old Toll House morsels didn’t melt in a nice way (and I’ve since learned that it may be a moisture issue in my oven, check this out, but also, I looked online and there is some controversy out there about those chips). The bark still tastes good but is not as aesthetically pleasing as Jim’s mom’s bark was.

Sadly, my mother-in-law no longer eats things that contain gluten and has not made the bark for years. Neither had I, and now I remember why. I cannot stop eating it.