A great way to start the day!

This may come as a complete surprise to you, but I do most of the cooking in our house. I know. Shocking right?! But one area where Betsy has me crushed is in the daily breakfast department.

Before we started living together I used to not really eat breakfast at all. My breakfast started with a big cup of coffee. Of course, I was starving by lunchtime and would gorge myself on all kinds of snacks and stuff throughout the day.

Betsy on the other hand liked breakfast but she wasn’t much into heavy breakfasts. She used to eat cereal everyday.

These days, however, we are both all about the breakfast smoothie. This is her department entirely. I rarely make one. She’s been trying lots of different mixes over the last few months and she finally landed on one that I think is really solid.

We’ve been having this every morning for at least a month and I’m not sick of it at all. It gives me lots of energy. In fact, I get grumpy now if I don’t start my day with one.

Betsy's Breakfast Smoothie

Yield: 2 big smoothies

Prep Time: 10 minutes

Total Time: 10 minutes

Ingredients:

1 Cup orange juice
1/2 Cup yogurt
1 banana
2 Cups assorted frozen fruit (we usually use a mix of mangos, raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries)
1/2 Cup tofu (silken works best, but anything will work)
1/4 Cup milled flax seed

Necessary Equipment:
A good blender (From Amazon. This is the one I've used for over a year now every day. Still runs like a charm.)

Directions:

1) Add all ingredients to a blender.

2) Blend.

3) Drink.

Making the Smoothie

Honestly, I don’t even think Betsy measures this recipe when she makes it every morning. I tried to get close to what it looks like she uses.

I know it always starts with these things though.

Frozen fruit is key.

Frozen fruit is definitely key for a good smoothie. It means you don’t have to add any ice at all. We just buy the mixed berry frozen fruit packages and use those so the smoothies have a little bit of everything. We went through a phase were we would buy the individual frozen varieties and try to perfect the mix, but it wasn’t really worth it.

On the order

I’m honestly not really sure if the order matters when adding your ingredients to the blender. I mean, after all, it is a blender. It’s gonna blend whatever you put it in unless you have a really crappy one.

We usually do liquids, then soft stuff, then frozen stuff, but I’m not sure that it really makes a difference.

Order probably doesn't matter too much.

The two ingredients that we’ve most recently added to this mix is the tofu and the flax seed. Some might say that this makes us hippies, but I say that it makes us healthy!

The tofu is packed with protein which keeps you full longer throughout the day (and trust me you can’t even taste it). Meanwhile the flax seed is one of the best sources of fiber out there.

One note on the flax seed. If you want to try it out, make sure you get the ground (or milled) variety and not the whole seeds. You can’t really digest the whole seeds.

If you’re bored, here’s the full nutritional breakdown on ground flax.

That's tofu. Not feta.

If you’ve never tried adding flax to things like smoothies, I really recommend it. And it’s not one of those hippie foods that’s crazy expensive either. You just use a few tablespoons at a time and you can get almost a pound of it for a few bucks on Amazon.

Whole flax would be pointless I guess.

Ok. So that’s the end of my flax rant. And no I wasn’t paid by the Association for the Future of Flax to say those things.

Back to the smoothie

Once you have all your stuff in the blender, just start it up! If it’s too thick add a bit more OJ and if it’s too thin, add some more frozen fruit. That’s all there is to it.

I really like my blender because it’s simple and it works. It only has two speeds: Pulse and ON. I’ve never really understood those blenders with like 12 different speeds.

Old faithful!

Pour it into a glass and serve it immediately! Actually, you can keep it in the fridge for 30 minutes or so without a problem, but it’s best right away in my mind.

Sometimes Betsy has one waiting for me when I get back from a morning run and that’s when I know I’m a lucky fella.

Great flavor and texture.

I’m not sure that I would attribute it entirely to these smoothies, but I’ve lost ten pounds this year which conveniently matches the amount of time we’ve been making smoothies for breakfast every day.

Get on the smoothie train people. Seriously.

Better than it looks!

Ok. I know. Not the prettiest photo I’ve ever taken. Turns out tapioca is kind of hard to photograph, especially when you don’t cook it 100% correctly. So you might be asking, “Nick, why the heck are you posting something that looks not-so-great and wasn’t even cooked correctly?”

My only answer is that darn it this was tasty. And that trumped the other issues I had with the dish.

I’ve had this bag of tapioca in my pantry for months now and on the back of the bag there’s a recipe in very tiny print for a tapioca fruit salad. I’ve been wanting to try it for awhile and just needed a reason. A few weeks ago, Bets and I went to a wine festival and I thought this would be perfect for a dessert during our picnic at the festival.

Obviously, it’s important to get really ripe fruit for this. Makes all the difference in the world. Also, the original recipe called for some pesky amount of fruit. I think I almost quadrupled the amount of fruit it called for because I wanted more fruit than tapioca.

Tapioca Fruit Salad

Yield: Serves 4-6.

Prep Time: 30 minutes

Total Time: 45 minutes + cooling time

Ingredients:

1/3 Cup small pearl tapioca
3/4 Cup water
2 1/4 Cup 2% or whole milk
Pinch of salt
2 large eggs, separated
1/2 Cup sugar
1/2 Teaspoon vanilla
3-4 Cups assorted fruits, chopped

Helpful Equipment:
- Patience and Strength (or patience and a mixer - hand or stand)

Directions:

1) Depending on the tapioca you purchase, your cooking instructions might vary, so cook the tapioca according to the instructions on your packaging.

2) Most likely, this will include beating your egg whites and sugar together until they form stiff peaks. You can either do this with a stand mixer or your hands and a whisk. It's hard work by hand.

3) Once your tapioca is simmering and thick (again, consult your packaging for times), take it off the heat and let it cool for a few minutes. Then fold 1 Cup of cooked tapioca into your egg white mixture. Be gentle.

4) Then fold the tempered egg white mixture back into the main tapioca. If you don't beat your egg whites long enough or let your tapioca cool (it should be warm to the touch but not hot), then your pudding won't firm up enough.

5) Let your pudding cool for a few hours in the fridge.

6) Chop all your fruit up into bite-sized pieces.

7) Fold the fruit into the pudding and serve! Again, be gentle when you're folding your fruit in. Tapioca is a delicate thing. Enjoy!

Making the Tapioca

I think tapioca falls into the camp of love it or hate it for most people. I happen to be in the love it camp, but I know some people who can’t stand the stuff. It’s understandable I guess. I think in most cases it’s a texture issue that people don’t like.

For this recipe, I thought that the soft, jelly texture of the tapioca actually worked well with the crunchy fruit texture.

I’ve made tapioca twice in my life. The first time was a disaster of beyond-postable proportions. This time was much better although still not perfect I’ll admit.

Normal ingredients and one weird one.

Depending on the type of tapioca you get, your cooking times and instructions will vary pretty largely so just be sure to check your packaging for instructions. It will look like an absurdly small amount of tapioca-to-liquid ratio, but have no fear that the little starch balls will do their thing and absorb it all.

So follow the instructions which will most likely include soaking the tapioca for a set amount of time in water and then slowly simmering it in milk and vanilla and egg yolks.

Also, you’ll have to whip together the egg whites and sugar. Mixing this in with the tapioca after it cooks gives the final pudding some volume and sweetness.

I thought I’d be all macho for this recipe and whip the egg whites by hand and let me warn you, while it is totally doable to do this, it’s a lot of work. You’re supposed to whip until the egg whites form soft peaks and I think I jumped the gun a little bit. These were my egg whites after probably 8 minutes of crazy whipping by hand.

In hindsight, they aren’t quite there yet. I should’ve kept whipping for another minute or so.

A bit under-whipped...

Quick Distraction

Tipsy did NOT like the egg-whipping process. She hated it so much in fact that she tried to hide inside the sofa.

Where's the cat? In the sofa.

Finishing the Tapioca

For some reason I was really impatient on the day I was making this. I didn’t beat my egg whites long enough and I also didn’t let my tapioca simmer enough. The recipe said 10-15 minutes but I think 20 minutes would’ve been better.

I thought it would firm up a lot after it cooled down, and it did to some degree, but I still should’ve let this simmer for a few more minutes.

It was just a bit runny.

Tapioca supposedly cooked.

It was interesting to taste the tapioca before blending in the egg whites because they were not sweet at all. In fact, it had almost a creamy/bitter flavor to it. Not exactly what I’d call tasty. Luckily, the egg whites (with the sugar) will give it just the right amount of sweetness.

To fold in the egg whites, make sure you let your tapioca cool a tiny bit. You want them hot, but not bubbling.

Next, fold in 1 Cup of cooked tapioca into your egg white mixture. Be gentle here people. Then slowly fold in your egg white mixture back into your tapioca mixture.

Pudding done! Before adding in your fruit, let your pudding cool to at least room temperature if not for a few hours in the fridge.

All together now.

Prepping the Fruit

The tapioca takes some time to cook and cool so you can definitely prep all your fruit while you’re waiting for it to do one of those things. Feel free to experiment with the fruit based on what looks good at your market. I used a mix of grapes, blueberries, strawberries, and some champagne mangoes that looked especially delicious.

Use what you want!

Of course, the mangoes are the most fun thing to cut because you get to do this to them! (For a full tutorial on the mango cutting, check out this post.)

Mandatory mango cutting photo.

Other than chopping up the mango, I halved my grapes, cut my strawberries into quarters and left my blueberries whole.

This was a pretty good little fruit salad just like this actually!

All chopped up.

Once your pudding is done and your fruit is chopped, just stir them both together! Be gentle with stirring the pudding though. It has a lot of little air bubbles in it and they might break down if you over-stir it.

Assuming you like tapioca, this rocked.

So as you can tell, it was a bit soupy, but it actually still tasted really good. To review… the things I think would fix the tapioca problem:

1) Make sure you don’t wuss out and actually beat your egg whites until they form soft peaks.

2) Make sure you cook your tapioca at least as long as the package says and maybe even a few minutes longer if it still looks runny.

Of course, there’s one thing that both of these problems has in common: Patience. I just didn’t really have it that day and my tapioca suffered a bit because of it!

Still though. Good fruit salad.

Smoothies can be so varied I really struggled for awhile on how to present a wide spectrum of recipes in one post. That was, of course, until I saw a guy riding a bike last weekend with a rainbow sticker on his backpack. When I saw the rainbow I thought, now those would be some awesome smoothies!

Anytime I think of a rainbow, I can’t help but think of the mnemonic device for remembering the order of the colors: ROY G. BIV!

After some tinkering, I present to you, the ROY G. BIV Smoothie Team!

Pretty.

Each of the recipes I used are below, but before that, there are a few quick notes on smoothies that I think are important.

First, smoothies are all about balance. You want to combine some sweet with some bitter. You want to make sure that your acids are balanced. Really if you do that and taste as you mix, you can’t go wrong. These recipes should all be seen as jumping off points. Mix and match and find your own, well, rainbow. (I should be a motivational speaker with lines like that!)

Second, whenever possible try to use frozen fruit instead of fresh. I usually use mostly frozen fruit just because it’s easier but some fresh fruit is fine. The thing to remember is that if you use fresh you have to throw in some ice which waters down the smoothie a bit.

Third, keep some juice (orange, apple, cranberry, pomegranate, etc) on hand as well as some milk or yogurt. Those can smooth out your smoothie…

So let’s take a trip through Roy G. Biv!

All of the smoothie recipes in this post are adjusted for 2 Cups of smoothie which is about enough for one big serving. The cups in this post hold about 1 cup of liquid so I halved the recipes for this post because I didn’t need 7 cups of smoothies floating around.

The Red Smoothie. This is pretty straightforward. After I tasted it, I added a pinch of sugar because it was just a bit too bitter for my tastes. I also used frozen raspberries, but if you use fresh you’ll need to add some ice.

Other options: beets?

The Orange Smoothie. This one is just like a shot of vitamin C. It’s refreshing and delicious and if you’re afraid of flavor mixing, this is the one for you! If you can’t find clementines, you can use any orange-like fruit. Tangerines for example would be awesome.

For those that need a shot of Vit. C.

The Yellow Smoothie. This one seriously tasted like a milkshake. The banana and milk made it really creamy and the mango was nice and sweet. If you served me this blind, I’d guess there was ice cream in it.

Very sweet actually.

The Green Smoothie. Ok. I was a little worried about this one. Basically I just picked out a bunch of green stuff and threw it together! At first, it tasted kind of funky (some would say it tasted healthy), but then I added a pinch of sugar and a tiny pinch of salt and that totally mellowed out the flavors. The sugar and salt are not optional in this one if you want it to taste decent.

Shockingly, green was pretty good!

The Boozy Blue Smoothie. Ok. It turns out that there are no really blue foods. Sure there are some flowers and stuff, but there’s just nothing that pops with blue color. Blueberries are totally mislabeled. They are purple, people.

So I figured if I couldn’t find a food that was blue, I might as well making something with booze in it! This was actually really tasty and I could imagine sipping a few of these on a beach somewhere.

Maybe not for breakfast.

The Indigo Smoothie. This one is a really basic one, but the Pomegranate juice has huge flavor. Sometimes Pomegranate juice can be a bit bitter though and so the yogurt smooths it out nicely.

Delicious.

The Violet Smoothie. Ok. So this one was maybe my least favorite of the seven. It was pretty strongly flavored. I thought about maybe adding some plum to the mix which I think would keep it pretty violet but might mellow it out a bit.

In other news, I’m not entirely sure what the difference is between violet and indigo. It’s possible I’m slightly colorblind.

Violet = Indigo - Yogurt...

The Equipment. Of course, to make smoothies you’ll need a good blender. Now you could spend hundreds of dollars on a blender, but I’m not sure that’s really necessary if you’re just getting into the smoothie thing. I’ve had this really excellent professional Oster model blender for almost a year now and I use it almost daily. It’s nothing fancy but it has all metal parts and only two speeds: pulse and GO. What else do you need?!

Mine performs just like it did on day one!

Roy G. Biv!

Day to day though Betsy and I, surprisingly, don’t make our smoothie choice based on color. Like I said at the beginning of the post, we normally do a mix between the indigo, red, and yellow varieties.

Just one more...

It’s very possible that I had more fun making and writing this post than any post in Macheesmo history. There were moments when I had to just stop, look at my counter full of crazy colors and ingredients, and laugh out loud. It was so much fun.

I hope you all try some of them out and pass along this post to your friends. Also, leave a comment obviously and let me know which one you want to try or if you happen to know a blue food that I missed!

I reaffirmed two things when I made these sourdough pancakes.

1. I really, really like good pancakes and sourdough pancakes are maybe as good as it gets.

2. Blueberries make good pancakes into excellent pancakes.

Umm... Yea.

I made my sourdough loaf on day 2 of my barm and it wasn’t all that sour. I made these pancakes on day 4 and the flavor was definitely better. They had a really nice sourness that wasn’t overpowering at all. When you added the fruity blueberries and the sweetness of the syrup, they were really close to perfect.

Blueberry Sourdough Pancakes

Yield: 10 large pancakes.

Prep Time: 15 minutes + making starter

Total Time: 45 minutes

Ingredients:

Pancake Starter:
1 Cup Barm
1.5 Cups water
2.5 Cups flour (I used 1.5 Cups All-purpose flour and 1 cup whole wheat flour)

Final Batter:
1 egg
2/3 Cup milk
1 Teaspoon baking soda
1 Teaspoon salt
2 Tablespoons sugar
2 Tablespoons melted butter (original recipe uses vegetable oil)

Blueberries (Optional. Kind of.)
Maple Syrup (These guys deserve the good stuff.)
Whipped cream?
Strawberries?
Powdered Sugar?

Helpful Equipment:
Nonstick Griddle

Directions:

1) The night before serving pancakes, combine barm, flour, and water in a large container. Make sure it’s at least twice as large as your starter because it will grow. Stir everything together.

2) The morning of pancakes, add final batter ingredients to a bowl and whisk them all together!

3) Add the really runny mixture to your pancake starter from the night before. Fold it together until you have a batter.

4) Get out your favorite griddle and melt some butter on it.

5) When butter is melted and griddle is very hot, add 1/2 Cup of batter. That makes a pretty big pancake. Feel free to go for 1/3 of a cup for smaller or 2/3 of a cup if you like the pancake to hang off the plate.

6) As soon as the batter is poured on the griddle pup 10 -15 blueberries down on the pancake.

7) Assuming the griddle is hot, you should be able to flip the pancake after about 3-4 minutes. When you see lots of large bubbles popping up and the edges are starting to turn up, that’s when you know it is time.

8) Move the pancakes straight to a plate and add some butter if you want. A good drizzle of maple syrup is essential! Serve immediately.

Adapted from the Joy the Baker recipe.

Making the starter

As with everything sourdough, these guys take some time. I think in reality you probably only need to let this starter sit for a few hours before making the pancakes, nobody wants to wake up at 4AM and make it so that it’s ready when you need it.

So just do it the night before and thank me later. Basically, combine your barm, flour, and water in a large container. Make sure it’s at least twice as large as your starter because it will grow.

Basically a starter.

It will be wetter than bread dough, but not a batter exactly yet. Just stir everything together. This took me maybe 3 minutes the night before I wanted to make my pancakes.

Making the final batter

Add your final batter ingredients to a bowl and whisk them all together!

Basic ingredients.

Then add the really runny stuff to your pancake starter from the night before. Fold it together until you have a batter. It should be the consistency of thick gravy.

All together now.

Cooking the pancakes

To cook these pancakes, get out your favorite griddle and melt some butter on it. It’s important to use butter. Why? Because it’s breakfast dammit. I don’t condone any of that low-fat spray business.

When your butter is melted and your griddle is very hot, add 1/2 Cup of batter. That makes a pretty big pancake. Feel free to go for 1/3 of a cup for smaller or 2/3 of a cup if you like the pancake to hang off the plate.

As soon as your batter is poured on the griddle plop a few blueberries down on your pancake. I find that 10-15 is usually a good amount. Don’t get lazy and add your blueberries to the batter before you cook your pancake. That will result in Blueberry Clumpage which is my #1 pancake pet peeve.

Ready to flip!

Assuming your griddle is hot, you should be able to flip the pancake after about 3-4 minutes. When you see lots of large bubbles popping up and the edges are starting to turn up, that’s when you know it is time.

And remember: Flip with confidence!

Move your pancakes straight to a plate and add some butter if you want. A good drizzle of maple syrup is essential!

I ate all of them. Oh yes I did.

I’ve made some good pancakes over the last year and while the Cherry Chocolate Pancakes were maybe more inventive than these guys, I think I liked these more. That may be because I don’t have a huge sweet tooth and these were almost savory while the chocolate ones were pretty sweet.

Now, it’s worth nothing that the total prep time for these pancakes was close to two weeks if you add up the time it took to make the starter, the barm, and the pancake batter.

Nevermind all of that! They are good! They might not warrant making a starter on their own, but if you were on the fence about trying a sourdough starter, the idea that you can have these basically anytime after you have the barm made should be a pretty large push.

And the secret ingredients that we picked for this battle are:

Mangoes and chili powder.

I think we picked two great ingredients out of the possible ingredients. They actually go together pretty nicely and could be used in a ton of different dishes. I thought about doing something curryish, then considered using a nice piece of pork to bring the two ingredients together. I also considered making my own chili powder which isn’t too hard, but I couldn’t easily find good dried chilies.

Ultimately, I decided to go sweet. Dessert.

I wanted to apply the two secret ingredients to an old-fashioned recipe: cobbler and ice cream. So I made a Mango Cobbler with Chocolate Chili Powder Ice Cream.

Let’s talk ice cream first. I don’t have one of those nifty ice cream machines so I had to do it the old fashioned way which isn’t really hard but does take some time. Start with these:

Ice cream deconstructed

There are a lot of recipes out there for ice cream, at the end of the day I adapted this one from David Lebovitz. Obviously, I changed it to add the special ingredients.

Chocolate and Chili Powder Ice Cream
Make time: About 3 hours, mostly unattended.

- 1 1/4 Cups whole milk
- 3/4 Cup sugar
- A pinch of salt
- 5 egg yolks
- 2 Cups heavy cream
- 1/4 Cup cocoa powder
- 2 Teaspoons chili powder

First thing is to combine everything except the cream and eggs into a medium sauce pan.

The magic.

Whisk this together really well over medium heat until it starts to boil. Then you need to add this mixture to your eggs to make a custard base. Start by adding a little of your warm mixture to your eggs to temper them. This will get your eggs up to temperature. After your eggs are warm, you can add them back to your sauce pan without fear of making scrambled eggs.

I added about half of my hot mixture slowly and then added the egg mixture back to the other half of hot milk.

Then return this to the heat until this thickens a bit – probably 5 minutes on low.

The smell of chili powder was in the air.

The finger test.

Once your custard passes the back of the spoon test, strain this custard mixture into your bowl of cream. You strain it just to get out any little bits of egg that accidentally cooked. If you are super confident in your custard abilities then you don’t need to strain it I guess.

Then chill that mixture over an ice bath until it is cool.

Nobody likes scrambled eggs in their ice cream.

Once it is chilled, pour this mixture into a 13 by 9 baking dish and put it in the ice box. After about 45 minutes, take it out and with a whisk or fork, or electric mixer if you are a wuss, beat it up. Your goal is to break up all of the ice crystals that have formed and make it smooth.

It's a little bit of work. Don't be a wuss.

Return it to the freezer and repeat the beating every 30 minutes until it turns into, well, ice cream. I made mine the day before I made my cobbler and it keeps great for days.

The Cobbler. A good cobbler, in my mind, has a rich fruity filling with a thick crust. A good cobbler also requires ice cream so it is a good thing we have that covered.

Mango Skillet Cobbler (Adapted from The Best of America’s Test Kitchen)

Filling:
- 4 Tablespoons unsalted butter
- 6 Tablespoons sugar
- Pinch of salt
- 5 Mangos (cut into 1 inch cubes)
- 1 pint assorted berries (if I made this again, I would use less berries and not raspberries. Probably just blueberries.)

Thickener:
- 1 Tablespoon lemon juice
- 1 1/2 Teaspoons corn starch

Topping:
- 1 1/2 Cups all-purpose flour (I actually used closer to 2 Cups. Start with less though and add more if you need it.)
- 5 Tablespoons sugar
- 1 1/2 Teaspoons baking powder
- 1/4 Teaspoon baking soda
- Pinch of salt
- 3/4 Cup buttermilk
- 4 Tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled

Chili Sugar:
- 1 Tablespoon sugar
- 1/2 Teaspoon cinnamon
- 1 Teaspoon chili powder

First, peel your mangoes. If you are good, you can do this.

Extra points for keeping the peel in one piece!

Then get a large, oven-safe skillet and add about 3/4 of your mangoes and berries and all of your other filling ingredients. Cover this with foil and let it cook on the stove over medium heat for about 15 minutes. This will cook down the fruit so your end result isn’t too runny. Nobody likes a runny cobbler.

Healthy!

After it cooks down for 15 minutes, I added the rest of my fruit. This gave the final product different textures which is good. Also, it was at this moment that I realized the berries may have been a bit overkill.

Gives a different texture.

Once the fresh fruit is mixed in and warmed, add your thickener mixture of corn starch and lemon juice. Mix together the corn starch and lemon juice before you add it.

Ready to get a topping of deliciousness.

Ok. Cover that so it stays warm (I just use a piece of foil) and work on your topping. Combine all of your topping ingredients in a bowl and they should come together into a pretty wet dough. I added a bit more flour than the original recipe called for because it was too wet to work with. Eventually I got it into a ball.

Gooey topping.

Oh also, I made this while my cobbler cooked:

Chili sugar.

Back to the dough, knead your dough a few times on a floured surface. Just knead it for a few seconds, you want to keep it pretty light. Then roll it out into a 1/2 in thick rectangle and rip it up into chucks and throw it on your cobbler filling. It’s supposed to look kind of messy. Nobody likes a clean cobbler.

I also sprinkled it with a good amount of my chili sugar.

Cobbles added.

This goes into a 425 degree oven for 18-20 minutes or until it look like this:

This produced a great smell. The smell of VICTORY.

It will be hard, but let this cool for 10 minutes before eating. Then serve it up!

Lookin' good.

It looks good on a plate, but I like mine in a bowl so I can mix it all together.

I like mine in a bowl.

The Verdict. I had about 10 different people try this combo I created and I think it went really well. The only criticism was that the mangos got a little bit lost in the cobbler. Luckily, I kept my pieces pretty large so there were still large chunks of mango. The color of the raspberries took over the dish though.

The ice cream was a unanimous winner. The savory chili flavor was enhanced by the cocoa powder and it worked perfectly. It also paired perfectly with the cobbler.

Do your part!

This battle is all in good fun, but Dan and I still wanted to give our readers a way to vote. Use the below poll to vote and as I said before, the poll on his site and mine are linked so no need to vote twice and it doesn’t matter which site you vote on.

We didn’t really think of specific criteria to judge on, so use whatever criteria you want I guess!

Hope you guys liked my sweet take on these ingredients!

Update: Dan and I decided to close the polls at Noon on Tuesday, so vote by then.

That goal happened to coincide with a email from a reader asking if I had ever made protein bars, which I hadn’t, so I thought this would be a good time to give it a shot. This is what I ended up with:

Popeye should have eaten these.

The problem with a lot of protein bars that you buy in the store is they are A) expensive and B) not actually that healthy for you. I tried to solve both of those problems. I took a recipe from Alton Brown and modified it a bit. These are the ingredients I used.

Great ingredients

Macheesmo Muscle Bars

Dry Stuff:
- 4 ounces protein (I used vanilla soy, but go crazy. This is about 1 Cup.)
- 2 1/4 ounces oat bran (1/2 Cup)
- 3/4 ounces wheat germ (1/4 Cup)
- 1 ounce rolled oats (1/4 Cup)
- 1/2 Teaspoon kosher salt

Wet Batter:
- 12.5 ounces silken or soft tofu. An average container is 15 ounces, which is a bit much.
- 2 large eggs
- 2/3 Cup almond butter (you could use peanut butter to save some $)
- 1/2 Cup Orange Juice, or apple juice
- 2 3/4 ounces whole wheat flour (1/2 Cup)

Other stuff:
- 3 ounces golden raisins
- 3 ounces dried cherries
- 5 ounces dried cranberries
- 4 ounces semi-sweet chocolate (optional)

So this does look like kind of a lot of ingredients and I would encourage you to experiment to reduce costs and also change up flavors. Try to keep the dry/wet ratio about the same. Also, this is one of those recipes that is expensive the first time you make it because the protein, wheat germ, and almond butter if you are using that. These are sort of pricey, but if you make these more than once your costs per bar will plummet.

Also, I did this recipe by weight because I wanted to actually calculate the nutritional info in each bar. I don’t think it is that important to the recipe. I’m pretty sure you could use the approximations above and end up okay.

To start, let’s mix up our dried fruits just to get that out of the way. Also, now would be a good time to preheat your oven to 350.

Don't skimp on the fruit here.

Then mix together the dry ingredients listed above. This recipe is very easy once you have all your stuff together.

Dry stuff.

Next we need to make the wet batter. To start, whisk your tofu until it is light and a bit fluffy. Then add all of your wet stuff. Finally, add your flour to the mix. Whisk well to combine.

Wet stuff.

Next, incorporate your dry ingredients into your wet ingredients. Do about 1/3 of your dry at a time. You will need to switch to a fork to combine it all. It’s okay if it is a bit clumpy.

Mixed together.

Finally, stir in your fruit. I used raisins, cranberries, and cherries. Alton likes blueberries. Totally experiment here. You could try adding some nuts, or chocolate or tons of other stuff.

This is not rocket science.

Dump this batter in a 9 X 13 baking dish. It will be pretty thick. I lined mine with parchment paper which I highly recommend. I also sprayed my parchment paper with nonstick spray which I also recommend. If you don’t use the parchment paper, definitely use the spray.

Ready for the heat.

Bake this at 350 for 35-40 minutes. The dish will set up nicely.

These were pretty good like this.

I cut this tray into 16 bars. If you go smaller than that then they would be too flimsy I think. I tried a bit of one without chocolate and it was awesome. If you are using chocolate, be sure the bars cool to room temperature before you top them.

Why would you not coat these in chocolate?

These were not very hard and I’ve been eating them all week. My biceps are loving it.

As I noted before, I had the idea to calculate the nutritional info on these to see how they stack up to other bars. At first, I thought this would be an easy thing to do. I ended up with this crazy set of notes.

This was, by far, the hardest part of this recipe.

Ultimately though, I did manage to get the data right. Of course, these are still a bit inaccurate because it assumes that I cut every bar to the exact same size by weight. Oh well, it is close.

Per Bar:
Calories: 266
Fat: 10.2 g
Sodium: 200 mg
Cholesterol: 30 mg
Carbs: 34 g
Fiber: 3.7 g
Protein: 13.3 g

That is a pretty solid ratio of calories to protein. It would be even better without the chocolate which added some fat and calories without giving any fiber or protein. Oh well. This stacks up pretty well against most of the bars. The only bar I found that had a lot more protein was the Powerbar Protein Plus. It came in at over 20 grams of protein. I think it almost qualifies as steroids. My bar kicks its butt on taste though.

If you are looking for a decent afternoon snack that is packed with Protein, these are a great option. They keep easily for two weeks in the fridge.

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