apricot oat balls

Dr. Fuhrman is running this "Holiday Challenge" and he sends us a recipe a day. I decided to try Friday's recipe, the "No-cook Apricot Oat Bars." Well, I'm not a good baker (even when it's "no-cook"!) because I don't follow directions like I should, so this turned into something else quite different. And since it did, I figure I can post it as a new recipe.

Ingredients:

3/4 cup old fashioned oats

1 cup raw cashews

1/2 cup raw almonds

2 Tbsp raw sunflower seeds

1 tsp flax seed

2 cups dates, pitted

1/2 cup dried apricot, unsulfured, chopped

1 tsp cinnamon

Blend the oats to a coarse flour in a blender (my first mistake, I was suppose to process until coarse in a food processor!). Blend 1/2 cup cashews until fine. Add the cashews to the food processor with some water and dates, and process until it smooth. Blend the other nuts and seeds until coarse or fine, in the blender. Add these and everything else to the food processor and process until it stops doing anything useful--a big ball rolling around. Roll into a bunch of little balls.

This is super sweet! I wouldn't call this "healthy". And it's quite high-calorie. You could probably half the amount of dates. However, this is great to take to a party. I ate several and then decided I'd had more than enough, so I saved the rest for a party. Just to make sure I didn't eat any more and to make sure the SAD eaters would like it (SAD = Standard American Diet), I combined cocoa powder and powdered sugar in a bowl (hot cocoa mix works too!), and doused all the nut balls in this mixture. They became chocolate covered nut balls. People loved them and they disappeared quickly! Sorry I forgot to snap a picture. They were cute little balls.