Homemade Granola Bars

Homemade Granola Bars

One cloudy, blustery day, I had a sudden craving for something sweet, crunchy, chewy, delicious...& so forth, I stumbled upon this recipe and knew I just had to give them a try! I tweaked the recipe a bit to fit the ingredients I had on hand, but they still turned out finger-lickin' good!

Homemade Granola Bars

Ingredients:

1/2 cup coconut sugar
1 1/2 cups honey

 1/3 cup coconut oil 

 1/4 tsp. fine sea salt 

 1 cup peanut butter (or any nut butter that you desire)

 2 tsp. vanilla extract
4 cups crisped rice cereal (I used Quinoa Crispies)

 2 2/3 cups old fashioned oats
2/3 cups flax seeds
1/2 – 1 cup chocolate chips

Start out by melting your, honey, coconut sugar, coconut oil, and nut butter together. Once you take it off the heat, mix in your vanilla.

Mix together your quinoa crispies, oats, flax seeds, and salt.

Pour in your wet mixture and mix until it's well combined.

Have a set of identical-pans ready, along with two pieces of wax paper to fit them.

Dump mixture onto one of your wax-paper-lined pans, and flatten as best you can with your hands.

Place the other piece of wax paper over the top.

Then set your other pan on-top of that pan, and either press it down with your hands, or you can use a rolling pin. I did both. ; ) The reason for this step is to smoosh all your granola together and further flatten them out.

It should look something like this when you're done. 

If you are fortunate enough to have mini-chocolate-chips, add those now and repeat above step to push the chips into the dough. Or if you are not fortunate enough to have mini chips, then you could throw some regular sized chocolate chips in the blender and make chocolate flour and sprinkle that on-top. *ahem* By the way, I think I'm going to start a business in chocolate flour. 

Now you'll want to cover your pan and stick it in the refrigerator for several hours to chill completely.

Once chilled, cut into bars.

Now, I have to do some bragging on these lil' bars. Usually when I make something that is healthy, raw (or no-bake), or whatever the guys aren't generally too excited about them. They will taste them (because I make them...), but they don't absolutely love them. Much to my grief!

BUT, that is not the case with these!

I made the guys try them...and...they loved them 

Like so much that they (Cim in particular) actually dug through the refrigerator looking for them, and then proceeded to wolf several down.   

Oh, and don't worry if you have a few crumble..they are still delicious eaten as is, or they could even be used as cereal..just add milk!

See this

fortress

of

granola bars? We demolished, catapulted, and further proceeded to bombarded.... another way of saying it is, we ate all of them (we = meaning all three of us..) in less than two days. *ahem* We might have liked them just a scosh.

Recipe courtesy of:

 http://happymoneysaver.com/no-bake-homemade-chewy-granola-bars/

Blessings - 

~ Aspen

Green Smoothies Galore

Green Smoothies Galore

Would you like to detox, loose weight, have gorgeous skin and hair, and be full of energy? If you answered "YES!", then raw, green smoothies are the thing for you!

(I feel like I'm doing an advertizement!)

  Green smoothies are extremely simply to make, trust me if there was any rocket-science involved in making theses, I would not be telling you about them!

I cannot say enough about these mean, green, lean ( ok..stopping now...) smoothies! If I have a green smoothie, say one a day for several days, then I go a day without having one, I start to crave them. No, seriously, I do! And this is the kind of craving that you can give into and feel good about! ;)

I think 99.99 % of people now-a-days are all seriously lacking in the raw, green vegetable department. Hardly anybody gets enough of them. But, really who wants to consume a huge bowl full of salad every day? It's defiantly not going to be me! To be honest, I'm not overly fond of eating salads, never have been, and most likely never will. I do make myself eat them, because I know they are so nutritious for me, but I defiantly do not enjoy them. So, is there a solution to the problem? Yes!! Green smoothies to the rescue!

Thanks to the handy-dandy blenders there is now a way for us to get all those healthy greens packed into a delicious drink, that even your kids will enjoy!

Trust me on this one!

Alright! Let's make ourselves some smoothies!

First off, if you do not have a greenhouse full of well...greenery...then you can easily pick up some organic greens (for beginners I suggest using organic spinach, as it's practically taste-less) from the store. 

But for those of us who do have their own greens, just zip out there and grab yourself a bundle of greens.

Currently we only have a few things growing in the greenhouse..

some of those things include these lovely flowers...who's name escapes me at the moment...

We also have a bed..er I mean a plastic water tub..full of assorted greens, such as lettuce, lettuce, and um..perhaps some more lettuce. No actually there are some more greens mixed in, but I am not the most skilled person in plant names so I can't tell you what they are.

There is just something about green plants that make me feel happy and alive...of course it probably has nothing to do with being in the dead (literally) of winter, at the moment and there being no other greenery growing besides that in the greenhouse, no absolutely not, that is no coincidence.

Once you've picked yourself a nice bunch of greens take them indoors and wash them thoroughly. 

A little dirt never hurt nobody, but nobody really wants it in there food, if it can be prevented. Yes? Of course yes!

Next assemble all your ingredients. Below are mine:

Lemon jucie, aloe vera, green juice (we buy organic green/fruit juice from our food co-op), carrot juice, green powder (pretty much it's a bunch of dried herbs & vegetables), and chlorophyll.  

Use your own proportions on this, like I said it's not rocket science. I prefer my smoothies to be more like juice, something I can easily drink using a straw, not a spoon, so I add more liquid to mine. If you want yours to be thicker, add in some yogurt, frozen fruit, apples, bananas, etc. Get creative.

Once you've shoved all your green-gredients in the blender, whizz away until well combined.

If you are not fortunate enough to already have a smoothie bottle, then any 'ole cup will do.

 Here you can see how runny I like mine to be.

And your finished! There now, wasn't that easy! Told you, not rocket-science. ;) 

 It's as easy as baking a cake..unless of course your Fauna...

 

...then that statement would be invalid, and you'd just have to take my word for it. Savy? 

Enjoy your cup 'o green juice, unless you're like me and you consume the whole blender full. Yes, well I told you I'm addicted to them. I may or may not go completely crazy after consuming said-blender-full-of green-yumminess. So be warned, if you ever come over to my house and I am jumping off the walls and running around like a maniac, it's probably because I just consumed a blender full of greens.

Cheers and down the hatch! 

Blessings - 

~ Aspen

Chunk The Recipe Book!

 Chunk The Recipe Book!

a.k.a  troubles-of-a-non-recipe-book-looker-at-er

Something I seem to have trouble with like....a-lot! I simply and inexplicably cannot seem to do it. After saying all that, you should be understanding and not judge, when I tell you that I had this fantastically, yummy, delicious, and otherwise scrumptious recipe to share with you all, and I would have, except I didn't follow the recipe and it was a flop...somewhat. After some modification, I turned the "flop" into something edible, but more on that in a bit. Right now I'm going to tell you how not to follow a recipe.

This recipe was based off of this one here.

First, cook your rice (I used brown) and drizzle in some olive oil.

Meanwhile grab a head or two of garlic, cut off the top, wrap in foil and stick in the oven at 350F until cooked.

Cook your rice until it's nice and fluffy.

Oh, and before you go any further you *might* want to grab yourself a cup of kefir water to hydrate. All better? Better. Good! Lets continue...

Your rice is cooked, your garlic peeled and mashed and you've added in your salt, pepper, and shredded cheese.

Pour in your milk, add your eggs.

Place mixture in a buttered pan and...

bake until golden brown.

Doesn't that look (and taste) delicious?! You would think so wouldn't ya! But looks can be deceiving (come on! you all know that!). Such is the case with the above specimen. Instead of tasting amazing it tasted like eggy rice, what ever that may be. So, after hanging my head in shame and mourning (not really, I don't get emotional in the kitchen...unless there is an onion involved...then I cry) I wrapped the pans up and stuck them in the freezer to do something with later. I was heartily sick of rice, eggs, and cheese at the moment. Well let's fast-forward to the next day shall we?......next day....I pulled one of them out of the freezer, defrosted it, cooked some ground meat, threw in some more cheese, crumbled up the eggy rice, mixed it all together and voila we had ourselves a tasty dinner! Forget the details about how I messed up the original recipe, forget how I didn't follow the recipe, lets just forget it all, shall we? Nobody likes details anyway.

...

Oh and by the by, I'm pretty certain if I was to be a Disney character, I would be.........

 Yep, Fauna is who I would be. I mean seriously, we both fly about using our magic wands on anything, everything, and anybody. We wear aprons, silly looking bonnets...

and uhhh...we both cook using the exact same method.

Forget recipe books people, chunk them! Take it from Aspen and Fauna, recipe books are old fashioned. You're better off without them.

 Blessings from:

*Aspen* & *Fauna*