February 5, 2012
Homemade Energy Bars

By Erica

Last night, Camila, Eileen, Chris & I watched my one of my very favorite sports movies, “Miracle.”  If you haven’t seen it, you should. It’ll make you cry and also want to do insane hockey drills while Kurt Russell shouts “AGAIN” at you over & over until someone realizes that it’s all really a team unity lesson.

 

In addition to watching the USA beat Russia in one of the most important hockey games of all time, we attempted our first homemade power bars.  One of the most crucial aspects of completing an Ironman is race nutrition.  When you’re moving your body for 14 hours straight, you have to get calories into yourself as efficiently as possible. This is why Powerbars, Cliff Bars, Gu etc. exist— and also why it confuses me when people eat Cliff Bars during a normal day.  Not necessary.

Anyway, I didn’t want to constantly be putting manufactured food chunks into my body for many reasons:

1) They are expensive

2) I don’t want all those chemical preservatives in my body

3) I’m allergic to soy and most bars are soy based; relatedly, I just want to have more control over what kinds of nutrients are in the bars (i.e. more protein-y for some parts of the race, more carb-y for others)

All of this led to the logical conclusion that we should make our OWN energy bars.  I did some research, and it seems like there are two basic bases for energy bars: you do something oat-flour based that you bake, or you melt some sort of nut butter, mix other stuff in, then let it re-harden. For our first go, we tried the former.  We based our recipe off of “Jo-Ann’s Power Bars”.  (Our tweaked recipe is at the end of this post.)
The bars turned out delicious, but a bit too crumbly. I would use this recipe again if I wanted something to eat after a run or bike. But, I’m excited to play with the recipe more to get it right for race food.  I think next time I’ll double it & add some nut butter to make it more cohesive.  If I’m going to be sticking these in my shirt pockets on long hot bike rides, I want something that will hold together a bit more. This will take a lot of tweaking to get the bars that I want, but by the time September rolls around, we’ll have some really great food options!
Crumbly (but still pretty great) energy bars by C & E & E
Ingredients:
  • 1 cup quick-cooking rolled oats
  • 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
  • 1/2 cup cracked wheat
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1 beaten egg
  • 1/4 cup applesauce
  • 1/4 cup honey
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 1/4 cup unsalted sunflower seeds
  • 1/4 cup peanuts
  • 1/4 cup dried cranberries
  • small handful of dried chopped dates
  • small handful of chocolate chips

Directions:

Combine dry ingredients (first 4), then mix in wet ingredients (egg to oil).  Lastly, add nuts, fruits & chocolate. Spread out in foil-lined 9 inch pan. Bake at 325 for 20-30 minutes.

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