Recipe Review

A few weeks ago I was gifted "True Roots" cookbook.

You KNOW you're curious what K. Cav's cooking for her crew. I'll be honest- not only did I used to watch Laguna Beach...and then The Hills- I was not a fan. She was so bratty and spoiled! I was SO much more mature at 20 years old.

Hrrrrrm...

...or not.

Now I follow her on Instagram and find her mom hustle admirable.

I picked Blueberry Cashew Bars as my first recipe to try. Now that I'm packing lunches for my four year old, I like to have a sweet type of snack for him. Plus both the boys are ravenous hangry beasts come around 4:30 afternoon.

The ingredients are straightforward, however I subbed chia seeds for hemp seeds, and used vanilla paste rather than dried vanilla. She does not say what size pan to use, so that's annoying. I used an 8x8 square pan and could've gone with a 11x7 instead.

The bars themselves come together fairly easily but you will need a food processor. Mine is pretty small so it took me two rounds of processing for each step (note to husband- larger Cuisinart for Christmas please!). I was skeptical about the texture- the bottom layer is very sticky, as it's pretty much cashew butter. Freezing it completely and then thawing for ~20 minutes helped me cut them into bars to package up.

I'll admit that as I was ordering the ingredients I was getting a little huffy at the cost- cashews and cashew butter and dried fruit are not cheap! But I did do the math and these end up around $1.30 per bar, so realistically that's not terrible. Plus, they do taste really good.

Her cookbook does not give nutrition information so I did the legwork here. I cut my 8x8 pan into 20 bars. Per bar: 220 calories, 19 grams carbs, 15 grams fat, 6 grams protein. These are very calorically dense, so be mindful of that because it'd be easy cut, then eat, a large bar.

Overall it's a recipe I will make again, but I'll experiment cutting back the cashews and cashew butter and adding some oats as a lower calorie but still high nutrient binder.

'Til then..let's go back. Back to the beginning. Back to when the Earth, the sun, the stars all aligned...