Snack Recipes, Pliers Required?
This past weekend was full of new food recipes, some good and some bad. I started by planning meals for the week and decided to not just pick one new recipe but to shoot for four. I don’t know what got into me but it was worth a shot and they all sounded good. I was really excited about two of them in particular though, the snacks!
The Good, I Dream of Coconut Balls
They look good don’t they? The Cocoa and Coconut Snacks are what I tackled first and the adage of saving the best for last was completely inverted this weekend. These were the best snack I’ve ever made period. They are just the right combination of sweet and nutty and really satisfy my hunger cravings.
If your slightly shopping dysfunctional, like me, make sure to add some extra time to your trip for finding ingredients like Coconut Oil. Maybe your grocer is more intelligently arranged than mine or maybe you’ve purchased it before. I however had the double whammy of a poorly laid out store and having never even seen what the darn stuff looks like. Funny thing, when I arrived home with the bottle of Coconut Oil my wife mistook it for suntan lotion, I swear.
It even looks like Coppertone doesn’t it? Yes, before you even ask those are indeed plier marks on the bottle. I don’t know what the manufacturer was thinking but I was completely unable to squeeze out the oil from the tiny little spout provided. I put every ounce of muscle I had into squeezing that bottle and barely got 1/2 a Tbsp so I resorted to manly engineering methods.
Note to self — Next time your buying a new ingredient, like Coconut Oil, don’t buy the pretty bottle … instead buy the functional one.
While making the the nut mixture (step 1 mind you) I thought I had messed up … I know, how hard is it to mix nuts right? Seriously the recipe said that after blending the nut mixture to put the powder into a separate bowl.
I don’t know what nuts they bought but my mixture of nuts at that point certainly wasn’t a powder, it was more like a clumpy mess of nut particles. No matter how much I mixed them in the food processor the oil in my nuts was too high to allow them to turn to powder. No worries though, even though they were clumpy they worked out great since they were thoroughly mixed.
One mistake I did make though, other than using pliers, was not making small enough balls. The recipe called for a dozen balls and I doubled the recipe so I was expecting two dozen. I ended up with only 18 which in itself isn’t bad … just be aware that nuts have quite a few calories so my 18 balls come out to about ~200 calories per ball.
Personally I know everything in them is 100% healthy and the fat calories are some of the best you can get (from nuts and coconut oil) so I feel zero guilt eating two of these as a snack.
I did tweak the recipe slightly as I was unable to find any Brazilian nuts at our fancy new ethnically diverse grocery store. Even without them they tasted great so don’t be worried if you can’t find them either.
In short I see this new nutty snack becoming a part of my staple snack regiment and likely will replace any meal bars in the future as well. I just to buy a cleaner pair of pliers to cook with.
The Bad, Garbanzo Gaboring
I’m not sure why but I was very excited about making these Crispy Roasted Chickpeas. I think it’s because I’ve tried chickpeas as a dried snack before and they were pretty tasty, these however turned out to be everything but.
I don’t have any witty or fun stories about this recipe. It went uneventfully and I was really confident while making them that I hadn’t messed anything up. In the end though I was expecting some pop of flavor but was left with a empty dull nothing. Maybe I didn’t let them get crunch enough? That might explain something but certainly wouldn’t explain the lack of flavor. Any ideas what I can change to improve them?
Those both look great! I’ve had food bottles that I couldn’t open either. That is beyong frustrating! I looked at the recipe for the chickpeas – with all those spices you’d think they’d be super tasty!