Breakfast Bars (Or, the ways in which I'm trying to not eat yogurt everyday!)

So, many years ago, my dad and I started playing around with home made alternatives to Clif bars. I learned a lot through those experiments and from time to time I play around with the recipe when I am tired of my usual breakfast options. Yesterday I made a "cookie" version with vegan chocolate chips and no veggies for class today and was inspired to share the "recipe" with you all. These are REMARKABLY similar to "Nikki's Cookies" on 101 cookbooks, but I think banana based treats are pretty standard to all health nuts.

Ingredients
3 big and really ripe bananas (You can sub a banana for 1/2 cup of pumpkin purée and make a wintry version too! I've never tried to go for all pumpkin, but it might work. I also sometimes use pumpkin butter instead of the purée.)
1/4 cup coconut, walnut or olive oil (I've only recently played around with coconut oil, but I think its my favorite for baked treats like this!)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon cinammon (Try more spices, especially if you're using pumpkin.)
1/4 cup shredded unsweetened coconut
1/6 cup chopped dried tart cherries
1/6 cup chopped dried cranberries
1/6 cup pepitas or toasted sunflower seeds
1/3 cup chopped carrots (grated beets are great too!)
3/4 cup coarse almond meal (Can sub peanut meal or cashew meal. I just always have sliced almonds that I can grind up, but use whatever raw nuts you have!)
1 cup rolled oats
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
Spelt flour as needed

Preheat the oven to 350. Prepare a baking sheet by lining it in parchment paper.

In a large bowl mash the bananas. Add the oil (if using coconut oil you'll need to heat it so that it is liquid), vanilla, and cinnamon. Stir well.

In a separate bowl mix the oats, almond meal, baking soda and salt. Combine with the banana mash. If its looking really wet, add some spelt flour a teaspoon at a time. It should be like thick cookie batter when its ready.

Handshape little "bars" on the cookie sheet. Bake for 17 minutes until the bottoms and tops are golden and the bars are set. These don't really spread, so don't worry about giving them a ton of space on the cookie sheet. I'm still trying to figure out how to get these to be just a little less soft so that they're more transportable. If you figure anything out, let me know!

Makes about a dozen.

The best cookies EVER

I love cookies but I am also, as many of you know, neurotic about my weight and health...So, I'm always looking for a cookie that satisfies and packs a nutritional punch. I adapted this recipe from 101 Cookbooks to make the following delightfully spicy, chewy, only marginally sinful cookies. These little carrot/oatmeal/tart cherry/walnut/ginger goodies more than satisfy my cookie craving...Though, it is hard not to eat all the dough before you bake them!

I also made this soup last night...And I highly recommend the recipe! I doubled the ginger, used a couple extra cups of water, and added a hefty bit of orange zest and some chard at the end and it is AMAZING...So hearty, so healthy, so flavorful that it almost makes me wish that winter were not (hopefully) about to come to a close. Almost.

A note on coconut oil: As Heidi mentions, coconut gets a bad rap. These are cookies so they aren't totally healthy...You should not eat 7 in one evening like I did. But, I think that as long as you're using "real food" ingredients pretty much everything is okay in moderation. On the plus side, coconut is delicious, making these makes your hands soft, and now that you have the coconut oil in the pantry you'll be able to use it to make really excellent Thai style stir fry!

Things I might do differently next time:
1. To make them more of a health snack than a treat I would sub 1/2 the coconut oil and 1/2 the maple syrup with puréed, super ripe banana.

2. Use more of a health flower (like spelt) instead of the mix of unbleached all purpose and whole wheat all purpose.

3. Experiment with other flavors-- red currants instead of cherries (my original desire, but dried red currants are hard to find!), use zucchini in addition to the carrots, sub wheat germ for some of the flour, add shredded coconut to make them even more indulgent, etc.

Ingredients
1/2 cup all purpose whole wheat flour
1/2 cup unbleached all purpose flour
1 cup rolled oats
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon fine grain sea salt
2/3 cup chopped walnuts
1 1/2 cups shredded carrots (packed into the measuring cup)
1/2 cup TART dried cherries
1- 2 tsp ground cinnamon
2 tbsp of candied ginger, excess sugar shaken and/or scraped off, chopped really fine

1/2 cup real maple syrup, room temperature
1/2 cup unrefined (fragrant) coconut oil, warmed until just melted (I used the Whole Foods 365 Organic kind. Its pretty important to the flavor that the coconut oil smell and taste like coconut.)
1 1/2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger

Directions
Preheat oven to 350F degrees and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Mix together the flour, baking powder, salt, and oats. Add the nuts, fruit, candied ginger and carrots.

Heat a small saucepan. Remove from the stove top and use to melt the coconut oil. Add the grated ginger, and let sit for a minute or two before adding the maple syrup. Stir well and mix gently into the dry ingredients to create a wet dough.

Refrigerate cookie dough for one hour so that it firms up.

The cookies will hardly spread. Use about 1 tbsp of dough/ cookie and bake them in the top of the oven for 13- 14 minutes until the tops are just barely golden.

Cool completely on a rack and store in an air tight container. Because these contain a lot of "damp" I don't think they're likely to last too long in storage so I recommend making however many you need and carefully wrapping and freezing the dough.

Yield: 2 dozen cookies (After you inevitably "sample" the dough several times while baking.)