Chocolate-walnut chewy clifbar knockoffs

Another of my favorite nectar bars is the dark chocolate walnut one. I made some modifications to this, adding some salt and some instant espresso powder, but they were darn close to the original - I think the melted chocolate and the cocoa really did the trick.

I searched around online for recipes first, and found this and this, so sort of combined them/did my own thing. I also only had 1.25C of dates left, and I think I could have gone with more. Oh well, next time.



1.25C dates (I'd recommend at least 1.5C for a sweeter bar)
1C walnuts
2oz dark chocolate
2 tbs cocoa
1/2tsp instant espresso powder
1 tsp vanilla
a hefty sprinkling of salt

Grind the dates up in a food processor until you have little bits of date. Toast the walnuts in a 350F oven for 8 minutes, until they're just toasty-tasting. Grind those up in the food processor, too, but not too small. Melt the chocolate with the vanilla in the microwave, and then stir in the cocoa, salt, espresso powder, dates and walnuts. Use your hands to really mush everything together and get it all mixed up well. Form the dough into 7 even balls, and then roll those into logs and flatten. Wrap in plastic wrap to store.

Thumbprint cookies

These are definitely some of my favorite holiday cookies - shortbread and jam is just such a good combination! We used some salted pistachios with some unsalted pecans for the nuts around the outside, and I liked that combination.


Thumbprint cookies
1/2C butter
1/4C brown sugar
1 egg, separated
1/2tsp vanilla
1C flour
1/4tsp salt
3/4C nuts, ground up
jam

Cream the butter and sugar together. Add the egg yolk and the vanilla. Add in the flour and salt, and mix that in. Form the dough into little balls, and press your thumb in the middle to make a hole, and set those aside.

Whip the egg white until its frothy, and put that in a shallow bowl. Put the ground nuts in another shallow bowl. Roll the cookies in the egg white and then in the nuts, and place on a greased cookie sheet. Once all the cookies are nutted, put a bit of jam in the hole of each cookie.

Bake at 350F for 10-12 minutes.

Cut-out cookies

This is a week of cookie recipes. Friday night Anna and I got together to bake some cookies, and I have about half the recipes on hand, so they'll get posted. Our list was: minty brownies, gingerbread in cute little muffin tins that totally didn't work, cut-out cookies, chocolate crinkles, thumbprint cookies, and pecan tassies. Quite a busy night! The brownies weren't cool enough to cut when I left, so no pictures of those, and the pecan tassies I don't have the recipe for, but the cut-outs, crinkles, and thumbprints are coming right up!

These weren't the best cut-out cookies I've ever made, but they certainly filled the niche. Plus, icing helps with any cookie. I'm sure I'll be making more cutout cookies this holiday season, not sure what recipe we use at home but it tastes pretty good. These ones are kind of chewy after baking, which works, its just a little different.

Cut-out cookies
Made 4 cookie-sheets'-worth - big cookie sheets
1/3C butter
1/3C sugar
1 egg
2/3C honey
1 tsp lemon peel
2.75C flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt

Cream the butter and sugar together, then add the honey, egg, and lemon peel. Mix together the dry ingredients, and then add that to the wet stuff. Chill if the dough is too soft, and then roll it out to ~1/8" thick. Cut out in fanciful shapes, and bake at 350F for 10-12 minutes.

Chewy ginger cookies

A while back, Melissa (one of my coworkers) made a molasses ginger cookie and brought it in, and it was delicious - chewy, soft, gingery. I decided that those were perfect holiday cookies, and I had her recipe, so I attempted to make them on my own. Unfortunately, I only had a small dribble of molasses left, so I just replaced it with honey. Close enough, and the cookies are chewy, so life is good. They aren't as dark as hers, but thats not really an issue.



Chewy ginger cookies
Made 67 cookies

3/4C butter
1C white sugar
1/4C honey
2-1/2C flour
1/3C water
1-1/2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt
1C candied ginger, chopped

Cream the butter and sugar. Stir in the honey and water. Mix together the dry ingredients, add to the wet. Stir in the candied ginger. The recipe says the dough might be very soft, in which case you should refrigerate it, but my dough was quite stiff. Because the air was dry, maybe?

Roll into little balls and flatten slightly, roll in granulated sugar and put on the baking sheet.

Bake at 300F for 8 minutes on an ungreased cookie sheet.

Note: these could be vegan cookies (I think they started out that way) if you used margarine instead of butter. Not for me, but maybe if you have vegan friends?

Chewy granola bars

A long time ago, I made some sort of granola bar thing that mimicked the Clif Nectar bars - specifically, the cranberry almond one. It was good, but I don't really remember that much from it. It had fresh apricots, dried cranberries, dates, almonds, and I think a little lemon juice. And I baked it.

I've also been making a bunch of apple leather, with the apple sauce that Ed has been making. I'll get to that in another post, at least its simple...

Anyway, I'm always searching for the ultimate homemade energy bar - something that is portable, high energy, healthy, and tastes good. Those clif bar knockoffs were pretty good, but I thought I'd look around and see what other people were doing - I noticed a lot of recipes out there trying to replicate larabars, also a date-based bar made of real food, and most of those didn't require any baking. This was intriguing, so I decided to try it. Of course, I ended up changing stuff, as always... It had started with just dates, cranberries, and almonds, but then it seemed to dry, so I added some applesauce, and then it seemed too wet, so I added some dry stuff, you see how it goes. The end result was good, though, I think I have a winner!

Chewy granola bars

1/3C dates
1/4C dried cranberries
1/4C almonds
1/2C oats
1 tbs applesauce
1 tbs flax seeds
1 tbs sunflower seeds

Heat your oven to 400F or so, and as that preheats, chop the almonds roughly in the food processor. Toast the almonds for 5 minutes, you could leave everything raw, but I like the flavor of toasted things. Once the almonds are toasted, toast the oats, flax seeds, and sunflower seeds. Meanwhile, grind the dates into a paste in the food processor, then add the craisins and try to get those ground a bit too. Add in the applesauce and grind some more.

Dump everything into a big bowl, and mix it around with your hands until its evenly mixed. Roll it into five evenly-sized balls. It'll be really sticky, so it might help to occasionally wash your hands. Once you have your little balls, roll them into logs and flatten them out. Then, wrap them in plastic, and you've got chewy granola bars ready to go!

Spaghetti squash

I bought a spaghetti squash the other day - really had no idea what to do with it, but thats where The Google comes in. Ed warned me that he didn't like spaghetti squash, but I wanted to try it anyway. Apparently, you're supposed to either boil it, microwave it, or bake it, until its cooked, then take a fork and tear out the little spaghetti-like pieces. I went with the baking approach - cut it open length-wise (although Ed had cut it open cross-wise first, wanting to see if there was spaghetti inside), scoop out the seeds and gunk, smear olive oil over the inside pocket and the flat bits, and put it face down on a baking sheet in a 350-400F oven for 20-30 minutes. Its done when you can insert a knife smoothly and easily into the back - this happened at about 20min for me, and it was still a bit on the crunchy side when we pulled out the strands of spaghetti. I decided that I like it that way.



We served it under a stirfry, and it was ok. Not amazing, but it served the purpose of being a generic yellow starchy thing. Ed ate it, and proclaimed that while it was edible, he didn't see the need to make it a regular part of our diets... I kind of agree, although it was definitely kind of cool.



We have lots of leftover spaghetti squash. Next up will be spaghetti squash fritters, but I decided to make something disgustingly healthy this morning to use some of it up - I cooked some quinoa, added some ricotta (left over from when Ed made the ravioli), some parmesan, and some boiled kale, with some salt and hot pepper. I'm not sure that deserves a recipe, adjust the seasonings and amounts as you see fit. It actually tasted pretty good, I liked the mix of textures in the dish. But I know better than trying to serve a pile of glop like that to Ed...

Ricotta-Prosciutto Ravioli

Ed made heaven the other day - homemade ravioli filled with ricotta, proscuitto, and maitaki mushrooms cooked in butter, in a sage-butter sauce. *drool*. The filling was delicious, but wrapped in pasta dough it was even better. Making the pasta dough takes some work, in fact I've never done it myself because it seems like too much work, but Ed isn't daunted by work. Hes better at rolling things out than me, anyway. I'm not sure I got the recipes right, its Ed, he doesn't really work from recipes, but its all approximate anyway.


Ravioli dough
This was enough dough for 21 big raviolis

2/3C flour
1 egg
A little olive oil
salt
Extra flour as needed for rolling out

Mix together the flour, the egg, a pinch or two of salt, and olive oil as needed to make the dough elastic enough to knead (I don't think it was much oil, probably a tablespoon or less). Knead the dough to bring it all together, and then let it sit for at least 30min, to hydrate the flour. Cut the dough into four pieces, and commence rolling - use lots and lots of flour to keep things from sticking. You want to roll out the dough until it is 1/8-1/16" thick, more or less - pretty durn thin. Ideally, roll it into long rectangular pieces, as that makes for easier filling.

Filling
This also filled 21 (large) ravioli just perfectly

1C ricotta
~2C mushrooms, uncooked
~1/4lb prosciutto
salt
1 egg
Butter for cooking the mushrooms
~1C grated parmesan cheese

Chop the mushrooms into little pieces and cook the mushrooms in butter with some salt until they have given up all their moisture. Add them to a bowl with the ricotta, prosciutto (also cut into little pieces), the egg, a pinch or two of salt, and the parmesan. Mix it all together. Use it to fill the ravioli.



Assembly
Take one of your rolled-out pieces of dough, and put down 4-6 little blobs of filling. Fold the dough over on itself, and really seal it around each ravioli. Then cut them apart, and trim the edges. If the edges won't stick together, you might have to employ an egg wash to make them stick.



Sage butter sauce
1/2 stick butter
2-4 tbs fresh sage

Melt the butter in a small saucepan. Add the sage. Cook, on low, for ~5min (I'm making that number up, I have no idea how long Ed cooked the sage). I think the longer you cook it, the more sage-y the butter will become. Go ahead and taste a sage leaf - they're crunchy, buttery, and delicious. Ed then took out the sage leaves and chopped them up, then returned them to the butter, for proper distribution on the pasta. Don't skip this step, its totally worth it. You can do it with any fresh herb, but sage works particularly well with the rich creaminess of the ricotta and prosciutto.


Once you've filled all your ravioli (you might have to take all the edge scraps and roll those out to make another ravioli sheet), cook them in a huge pot of boiling water for 3-5 minutes. Not very long, but long enough to cook the egg in the filling.

Pour the sage butter over the ravioli when they're done.