Raw energy

If there is one thing that is true about the Hirsts, it’s that we’re always late. Always. But that doesn’t make for a very interesting blog entry, so moving on to the second thing that is true about Team Hirst: we like to snack. A lot. And one of our favorite snacks is a LARABAR. Unfortunately, we would have to remortgage our house in order to regularly snack on them, so we reserve them as a special treat for Ellie…and an even more special treat for Damian or me. But I stumbled upon a video showing how to make raw energy bars similar to LARABARS. After googling a few more recipes/methods, we decided to give it a try yesterday and I have to say, they are DELISH! And oh-so-easy to make. In less than an hour, we made four batches: (1) dates, blueberries, flax seed, and pecans; (2) dates, cranberries, flax seed, and walnuts; (3) dates, figs, flax seed, and pecans; and (4) dates, apples, raisins, flax seed, pecans, and walnuts.

In case you’re interested, here’s how we did it.

1. We put 1.5 cups of whole dates, pitted and roughly chopped, and 1.5 cups of other dried fruit (cranberries, blueberries, etc.) in the food processor and blended it to a paste.

2. We added 2 cups of nuts and 1/4 cup of flax seed (which we had milled to a fine powder in the blender) and blended thoroughly. Damian preferred to put the nuts in the blender first so they completely blended into the dates mixture – I like to see/taste little bits of nuts, so putting them in the food processor worked great for me.

3. We dumped the mixture onto a parchment paper-lined bar pan, folded in the edges of the parchment paper and pressed down firmly. Then we cut them into bars and (large) bite-sized pieces.

4. Put them all in Ziploc bags and into the freezer they went! Couldn’t be easier than that!

Now we can just pull out a few the night before, stick them in the fridge and have delicious, relatively inexpensive, raw energy bars everyday!

Even Charlie has discovered that they’re pretty tasty…and he’s still generally suspicious of finger foods. We can’t wait to try other flavor combinations – I think a tropical fruit and lime bar might be next on my list!