snacktime!

While I am mostly a three squares a day kind of girl, I frequently find that I need a bit of a snack in the afternoons to hold me over between lunch and dinner. Recently, I've also been increasing my running mileage a bit and I've discovered that while heading out the door for a three mile run first thing in the morning with nothing in my stomach is no problem, heading out on a five or six mile run without a little snack beforehand does not work out so well.

Of course, there are lots of easy snacks out there: fruit, the ever popular hummus and vegetables combo, a handful of nuts, and so on. But there are also lots of fun snacks you can make with not too much effort at home. Recently, I started experimenting with making my own fruit and nut bars, based loosely on the commercial Larabars. I am actually not a huge Larabar eater because those things are kind of pricey, but if you do like them, you'll probably have noticed the super short ingredients list. Each bar is basically some combination of fruit and nuts--pretty much nothing synthetic or chemically or what have you. Sounds great, right?

There are several recipes for homemade "Larabars" floating around on the internet (like this, or this). I checked a few out and then got to experimenting. For this first try, I was lazy and didn't feel like going out for special ingredients, so I used nuts and flavorings that happened to be in my cabinet to devise a chocolate hazelnut flavor combination.

I used:

3/4 c. dates (measure AFTER pitting)
1/3 c. raw hazelnuts
1/4 c. raw cacao nibs
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
1/2 tsp. hazelnut extract

To make:

1.Place dates in a food processor and blend into a paste. Transfer paste from processor into a bowl.

2. Place nuts and cacao nibs into processor, and pulse until finely chopped. Add nut/cacao mixture and extracts to bowl with date paste. It will look something like this:


3. Mash everything together. Use your (clean!) fingers. When everything is thoroughly mixed, shape the dough. You can go for bars, or pinch pieces off to roll into balls (I went with this method), or really, whatever you want. Store in the refrigerator to maintain maximum freshness.

This recipe makes about a dozen truffle balls or around 4 good sized bars.

So, how did they turn out? Delicious! So delicious that I disposed of them all before I remembered to take a picture of the finished product. Oops. However, I'll definitely be making these again, and experimenting with some flavor variations. I think a nice addition to these would be a spoonful of baking cocoa, to really intensify the chocolate flavor. Yum.