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    The Muesli Bar Challenge
    The Muesli Bar Challenge
    The Muesli Bar Challenge
    Ebook131 pages2 hours

    The Muesli Bar Challenge

    By Linda Woodrow

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    About this ebook

    It started with a rant about muesli bars marketed as suitable for kids’ lunchboxes or snacks. Muesli bars are so aggressively marketed, but in reality they are overpackaged, overprocessed, overpriced, full of corn syrup and transfats, made from cheap and nasty ingredients with a long shelf life.

    And yet, when you are frantically trying to put together a marginally healthy lunch that will actually get eaten, you can be forgiven for whacking a muesli bar in there.

    The Muesli Bar Challenge was my bet that I could bake easy, fast, lunchbox treats that were healthy, real food and acceptable to kids. It was a year-long series of recipes, one in every week of school term, reviewed by a team of school age reviewers ranging from kindergarten to high school. Their brief was to take my challenger to school each week and rate it for how it tasted, how well it satisfied hungriness, and how it rated in trade value with their friends. The rules were that the Challenger must be healthy enough for everyday food, that is, no corn syrup or transfats, little sugar and fat, mostly wholegrains, and based on fresh in-season ingredients. It also had to be quick and easy enough to make that it is actually a realistic option for busy parents (or kids themselves).

    The Challenger won every single week of the Muesli Bar Challenge. These are the recipes that went to school in a lunch box, never came home in the lunch box, and were rated by the reviewers as preferable to a muesli bar in every way.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLinda Woodrow
    Release dateJan 6, 2014
    ISBN9781311791221
    The Muesli Bar Challenge
    Author

    Linda Woodrow

    Permaculture, gardening, cooking, and community are the tags that come up most often in my web world. Of all the many things to love about life, food is the one I seem to focus on in my work life. Food is the basis for life – the pleasure of it and the keeping of it, and the basis of our relationship with every other species on the planet, either directly in a forage or predator relationship, or indirectly as competitors for the finite planetary resources. Honouring, respecting, enjoying, being responsible about food seems to me to be basic to loving life.Good food means food that is good for you, good for the planet, and just plain good ... all at once. Good food is meant to be enjoyed.

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      Book preview

      The Muesli Bar Challenge - Linda Woodrow

      Why The Muesli Bar Challenge?

      It started with a rant about muesli bars marketed as suitable for kids’ lunchboxes or snacks. Muesli bars are so aggressively marketed, but in reality they are overpackaged, overprocessed, overpriced, full of corn syrup and transfats, made from cheap and nasty ingredients with a long shelf life. And yet, when you are frantically trying to put together a marginally healthy lunch that will actually get eaten, you can be forgiven for whacking a muesli bar in there.

      The Muesli Bar Challenge was my bet that I could bake lunchbox treats that were healthy, real food acceptable both to kids’ sweet tooth and social standing, without needing to be a domestic goddess. It was a year-long series of recipes, one in every week of school term, reviewed by a team of school age reviewers ranging from kindergarten to high school. Their brief was to take my challenger to school each week and rate it in the comments, for how it tasted, how well it satisfied hungriness, and how it rated in trade value with their friends.

      The rules were that the Challenger must be healthy enough for everyday food, that is, no corn syrup or transfats, little sugar and fat, mostly wholegrains, and based on fresh in-season ingredients. It also had to be quick and easy enough to make that it is actually a realistic option for busy parents (or kids themselves).

      The Challenger won every single week of the Muesli Bar Challenge. These are the recipes that went to school in a lunch box, never came home in the lunch box, and were rated by the reviewers as preferable to a muesli bar in every way.

      A Note On Utensils

      I have a very ordinary kitchen, with an antique gas oven that isn’t fan forced. I don’t have a mixmaster or any fancy gadgets. I do use a food processor, and you’ll find a lot of these recipes call for one. A good, quality food processor that will handle nuts and pastry makes baking for everyday possible for busy people. Other than that, it’s just a fairly ordinary range of utensils – cookie tray, muffin tin, cake tin, loaf tin, baking tray, plus a big mixing bowl and an egg beater or whisk.

      A Note On Key Ingredients and Pantry Staples

      This book is formatted a little differently. When I cook from a recipe, I want to check that I have the ingredients, then just start, so that’s the way I’ve written this book. I hate flicking back and forth between the standard Ingredients list and the method in a recipe, and I seriously doubt that those nice little pre-measured bowls of ingredients happen anywhere except cooking shows.

      I’ve made a "Key ingredients heading at the beginning of each recipe. If you have the Key Ingredients, you probably have the rest in your pantry, or easy substitutes. You need" has the rest of the ingredients. The quantities are in the recipe itself. I think this makes it easier to read and follow. All my recipes are pretty forgiving – I don’t do the kind of baking that calls for to-the-gram measuring or exact temperatures or hard-to-find ingredients or utensils.

      Pantry staples (ie, not key ingredients) are:

      > Flour – wholemeal (wholewheat) by preference, and both self-raising and plain. But if you don’t have any self-raising, you can always make it by adding 2 teaspoons of baking powder to every cup of flour.

      > Cornflour (cornstarch to US readers)

      > Rolled oats – plain rolled oats, not quick oats or sachets (though you can substitute if you have to)

      > Sugar – brown and raw, though white will often substitute

      > Eggs (though if the recipe calls for more than 2, I put it in the key ingredients)

      > Butter – real, ordinary butter not margarine or spread or blends, though they’ll sometimes substitute

      > Milk – low fat is fine

      > Oil – virgin olive oil is wonderful for salads but it doesn’t work in baking. For baking you need a mild flavoured oil, preferably mostly monounsaturated, like light olive oil, peanut oil or canola oil.

      > Baking powder

      > Bicarbonate of soda

      > Vanilla essence or paste

      > Ground spices – cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom, ginger

      If you have this little range on hand, add a couple of key, in-season fresh ingredients and you have an enormous range of treats possible.

      A Note on Nuts

      A lot of these recipes have nuts. If your child has a nut allergy, this may not be the book for you. I include nuts because, number 1, they are tasty, and 2. there is a lot of

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