Fruit & Nut Bars - 9/2

Sorry for the delay in posting....  We have a new family member.

Her name is Genoa.  Like the sail not the salami.  :)  Erin and her husband are sailors.

We decided to bake something on the healthy side of baking.  If there really is such a thing.  You could say that a homemade ding dong is healthier than a store bought ding dong because there are less preservatives and other stuff in them but you couldn't really say the a homemade ding dong is healthy period.
We figured less butter, eggs and sugar would constitute healthy so, we chose to make fruit and nut bars from the Joy of Baking website.  We had almost all the ingredients except for the dried apricots and the choice of figs, dates or prunes, of which we chose Dates. Erin particularly wanted to use dates because of her fond memories of the China Ranch Date Farm, which she visited over 10 years ago.  If you make it with any of the other combinations let us know how it tastes.  We also used Pecans instead of Walnuts because we had some left over from our Pecan Sandies post.

There was a good amount of chopping. The pecans had to be chopped. The apricots had to be chopped and the dates too. We aren't that great at it but anyone with limited chopping proficiency would have it done in a jiff.

Everything without the egg wash yet

The ingredients came together quite quickly.  In fact we would recommend making this if you have a bit of extra time instead of buying bars at the grocery store.  They don't use too much flour so you are mainly getting to enjoy the taste of dried fruits and nuts.

Mmmmm Fiber!

We were really happy with the way they came out. They smelled and tasted great. They were sweet without a lot of sugar, but not too sweet.  It's a perfect snack to make and keep around. According to the original recipe they can be stored for up to 10 days. Ours didn't last that long. They were eaten up by co-workers and family members long before that.

Lessons learned: We should bake more with dried fruit. It's really good and good for you.

Potato Chips 7/27

SNACK TIME!!!! This is one of our favorite parts of the day. You get to take a break and nosh on something yummy. Lately there's been a craze with potato chips and crackers where the packaging toughts that they are baked. This is supposed to be healthier so lots of popular brands are now available in a baked variety including Doritos and Cheetos. We think that's a little weird but we figured if they can bake up a batch of chips, they why couldn't we do the same?

Well it's not that easy. After several attempts with different recipes, a trip to the vet and a sleepless night, we came up with the answer. We'll share the trials with you:
We found 2 recipes on foodnetwork.com and we're excited to try this because it didn't seem so hard to make up some "mountain style" chips with some simple and healthy ingredients.

What we ended up with a variety of potato "items", none of which were what we were aiming for. They ranged from thin mojo potatoes to inedible burnt crisps. It was sad. We tried thicker slices of potato. We tried lower oven temps. Each time we thought we were gonna get it right and each time it was dissapointing.

We had out last attempt in the oven when we looked down and saw that our neice puppy, Lilly had a huge (well, huge for her) lump on her leg. We didn't know what it was and our concern for her far outweighed our attempts at potatoes so we took them out of the oven and dealt with the major matter at hand. We'll try again another time.

Lilly is fine. She had a foxtail working its way out from her paw. She doesn't seem to be hurting but she will be in the cone of shame for 2 weeks.

We did not try the potatoes again on Wednesday because we had a softball game. It was a fun game because it's a good group of people. The bad parts were that we lost and I (Erin) took a hard line drive to the thigh at the pitchers mound. I did pick it up and get him out at first but the resulting bruise kept me up all night. In that sleeplessness, I thought about potatoes and came up with something. We won't call it an epiphany but it is fair to call it a worthy idea. Potato excitement returned.
Sara left for Colorado to visit her pregnant bestie, Briana so the potato torch (Potatorch??) was carried on by me. The worthy idea consisted of fan folding aluminum foil and laying it on the baking sheet iso that there was less surface area touching the potato and more dehydrating warm air surrounding it.

This idea was in the test phase and so in order not to waste lots of Al foil, I used our very excellent toaster oven. Smaller area, less foil, less energy, it was a good plan.

Tim, my husband helped out since I had potato and oil all over my hands. He took some pics for us. He was soon fired in a scene that went like this:
click...clickclick...clickclickclickclick
Erin: Tim stop, that's too many!
clickclick...clickclicklclick
Erin: Tim, it's a baking blog not a fashion mag. I don't need you to be all "come on potato give me sexy eyes."
Tim: Well, that's no fun (puts camera down and walks away).
Erin: Thanks...
He did have a good idea though and one that makes a whole lot of sense. After cutting the potatoes, dab them dry with a paper towel. This helps them bake in the oil not their own potato juices. Potato juices are bad.
A potato is only gonna soak up so much oil, so we found that measuring it out was kind of pointless since we were never making as many chips as the foodnetwork.com recipes made. We were trying it out and failing. So when we sliced up as many chips as we wanted (then dried them), we just barely coated them with oil and pepper. We didn't need much more. Here's the recipe that we found worked for us:

Sweet potato
Olive oil
Fresh ground pepper
Salt
(Few ingedients means healthy-ish)

I cut the sweet potato in half and then sliced it to about 1/8 inch with a mandolin (this dish would be impossible without one).
Once I had as many chips as I wanted, I put them in a bowl, coated with olive oil and pepper. The sweet potato is not a wet as the russet and didn't need as much drying.
These were then placed on the fan foil lined baking sheet.
Since I used a toaster oven , I didn't preheat but would in mass quantities in a large oven. Also, I used the convection setting which I think was very insturmental in the drying, not burning of the chips.

They cooked for 25 minutes at 275 degrees.

Lessons learned: Try, try again. We knew we were on the right track and now we're happy to know that we can make healthy-ish potato chips that actually taste like potatoes and have no preservatives.
Also, maybe "Potatorch" should be a word. Thoughts?