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.

party

Today I went to an afternoon party. It's quite an affair, not fancy, but a lot of work goes into it: My friend builds a home-made mini-golf course in his yard and his partner prepares lots and lots of food. People bring lots of food too. It's almost entirely SAD food (Standard American Diet): cheese and crackers, sausage, barbeque, cake, cookies, brownies, macaroni salads with lots of mayo and meat, potato salads with lots of egg and mayo. It's interesting how my reaction to this situation has changed over time. I'm not tempted by most things, because most greasy stuff looks unappealing to me, though I enjoy some of the smells. The one thing that looked and smelled good to me were the chocolate chip cookies. If they were vegan, I wonder if I would have had some--I'm not sure because even those are starting to look less appealing to me because margarine kind of grosses me out now--big chunks of solid fat with salt? A few hours into the party, watermelon and cantaloupe showed up, and I ate a bunch of that, too much. This was influenced by watching everyone else eat so much. Then when I got home I wasn't hungry for dinner. I ate the rest of my greens, beans, and seeds dish, which was really good. And then I wanted to try my dessert idea in part because I wanted to enjoy a dessert like everyone else did. If I just went by hunger and real desire, I'm not sure I would have eaten anything at all at the party, because we ate a delicious lunch before going. Maybe I would have tried a little watermelon and cantaloupe to enjoy the taste--they were both good but not great. I was planning to go jogging after the party and before dinner, but eating so much of the watermelon and cantaloupe prevented me from doing that.

In conclusion, I've definitely changed very much in my desires and I'm not as much influenced by others' choices as I used to be, though it does still seep in a bit. I find it kind of interesting to observe this change over time. For those who are starting out, I say, if this is the kind of eating plan you want to adopt, and if you keep trying, you will change over time, so be patient and keep trying. If you are like me, you will give in maybe a lot at first but if you can establish an upward cycle where you give in less and less over time, your preferences will change and it will just get easier. It's easy to resist something if it's not appealing.