Snacky Snacks

Raise your hand if you're only three years into this parenting thing and you're already sick of snacks.    For real.  

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE snacks.  When both my newborns used to eat gingerly every hour and a half my mom would chuckle when I'd call to complain "oh Becky, they get their snackiness from their mama!".    It's true, while I can put it away when I want to I'm much more of a nibbler.  I can get by on very little in the mornings but come about 3pm? watch out pantry.

My girls have followed in my footsteps.  Now that Ainsley is FINALLY well on the weight charts for her age (20%!) and YaWeez is so active and hungry I'm finding we need a lot more food in this house all of sudden.

Until this point I've been able to get by on a bag of dried fruit and a bunch of cheese sticks per week.  Suddenly Ainsley's demanding variety and quantity and I'm weary of the store bought options out there (both for content and price).  So I've started making snacks, and let me tell you I'm loving it.

My first foray into snack-making was a cereal bar substitute with whole wheat flour, flax seeds and apple apricot filling.  I've raved about that one enough to know it's a keeper.  Easy to make with the girls, yummy and healthy and one batch made so much that we still have some in the freezer.

But that wasn't enough. I said variety right?  So I tried another bar, smitten kitchen's raspberry breakfast bar and they were AMAZING.  I didn't have raspberries, so I used frozen strawberries and blueberries and added ground flax seeds into the crumble.  The girls (and Ian and I) gobbled these right up.

On the docket this week are homemade cliff bars.  I'm excited about their adaptability to tastes and what's in the pantry.  I'm thinking I'll try the dried apple pecan version.

Bars aside I've tried Smitten's graham crackers and they were a smash hit.  Instead of making them into boring old squares I let the girls at them with a bunch of winter cookie cutters and sugar sprinkles.  Definitely a sweet treat but delicious and snacky nonetheless.

After succumbing to the temptations at Costco and buying a bulk box of mini muffins (and being simultaneously horrified a the ingredient list and that their expiration date was like a YEAR away) I vowed to make my own.  I bought a $12 mini muffin tin at Target and looked up a new recipe that has become my all time favorite banana muffin and made a double batch.  I froze half and we still pull some out for snacks and breakfast every few days.

Annnd cheese crackers...the bane of all parents' existance right? (Partly because they're addicting for me too!) I've seen lots of recipes for homemade cheese crackers.  Smitten Kitchen has two, both in goldfish and straw form.  I may first make a very simple recipe I found in my Wilton cookie press cookbook.  If you have a spritz cookie press you can make these too, and think of what fun shapes they could be in!

Another favorite of my girls' is dried fruit.  I have a food dehydrator from high school (yes, as a highschooler I asked for a food dehydrator for Christmas, I should have seen then the domesticity in me just screeching to be let loose).  Every once in a while I pull it out to dehydrate the dregs of fruit at the end of the week but I've seen lots of ideas for drying fruit in the oven to make "chips" and crisps and this is quite intriguing.  And yet one more fruit snack idea are fruit rolls in the oven.  Yes yes I will be having to make those too.

And who can forget popcorn?  I count this as homemade because after finding this idea on pinterest I will never buy bags of popcorn again!  You simply buy lunch sized brown bags, pour in 1/3 cup of popcorn, roll up the bag and microwave for 3-3.5 minutes.  Add some melted butter and salt and POPCORN!  One of our most favoritest easiest snacks.

And there you have it.  Snacky snacks.  LOTS of them.  I find making them keeps things interesting, relatively healthy and even a tidge exciting.

PLEASE share your snack successes with me.  I can use all the help I can get.