challenge accepted

so the 60-day challenge that i joined at xtend officially started yesterday.  only day one, and by the end of it i was grouchy and crabby and irritable due to lack of my beloved caramel macchiato and other sugary things.  yikes.  but i'm really trying, and in the last week i attempted a slow start on cutting out all of the junk.

remember these tasty "snax" we discovered at the cookie con last week?

i can't seem to find them anywhere locally.  of course.  and so i decided that i would try to make a version of them myself.  i figured, since the list of ingredients was short and simple, it couldn't be too hard...right?  so the girls and i headed off to monrovia to find things like chia seeds, rice syrup, and flaxseed.

using this recipe as a guideline for the basic instructions, i started measuring things into my food processor.  looks kinda cool, huh?

there's 1/4 cup each of chia seeds, ground flaxseed, and white sesame seeds in there, plus 1/2 cup each of peanuts and cashews and about 3/4 cup of pumpkin seeds.  next i added a little raw organic honey (something we already have thanks to those smoothies the hub loves) and some brown rice syrup.  i kinda winged the amounts, pouring in a little at a time.

it looked like this when i was done:

as i pressed the mixture into a pan to chill, i realized i'd gone a little buckwild with the wet ingredients.  oops.  next time, i'll measure and use less.  but the teen and i both tried a spoonful of it, and while it didn't look anything like the original snax, it definitely tasted like them.  this is a good thing.

the next morning, i cut it up into bars and wrapped them individually in wax paper.

while the bean isn't into much more than a couple of nibbles of it, the rest of the house seems to like them - they're gone!  yay!

now i'm going to check out trader joe's to see if i can find the ingredients there.  sprouts is crazy expensive, and i'm willing to bet that TJ's will come through.  fingers are crossed.