Last post earlier this week discussed what’s really in an ingredient and what that means to you, especially if you have dietary restrictions. Then, entirely coincidentally, this week I got a text from a good cycling bud asking whether to use sweetened or unsweetened coconut flakes and what type of chocolate chips to use to make Banana Nut Butter Power Bars. He couched his question with a note that his skills are pretty much limited to toasting Pop Tarts. Excellent on all fronts!
I loved the question! Right away, I tore down the old recipe to revise it with this more descriptive list of ingredients and…
…these new directions that you can get by clicking this link or any picture on this page.
Always glad to make changes – that’s “learning and adapting” life in action. And what I like best is hearing what works and doesn’t work for people actually using any recipe I put on this site so that I can help make your work – and mine – in the kitchen as easily fully flavorful as possible. That’s life enriched!
Very easy to make, fully flavorful, energy sustaining power bar sandwich
A good friend, George, popped me this power bar meme the other day.
The reason for disappointment: just look at the ingredients listed on a random search for power/protein bar nutrition labels.
Sample of commercially available power bar ingredient labels
About the only flavorful – and potentially real – ingredients in the above three labels combined are organic cashew butter, chocolate, peanuts and peanut butter.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
For the past 2 weeks, since two good cycling buds, Sean and Eddie, asked on a ride about making homemade power bars, I’ve been reworking older power bar recipes and working up new ones – and have sure learned a lot.
The most important lesson learned – that sometimes came the hard way: make is fully flavorful as quickly and easily as possible. And that’s how I approached this very easy-to-make power bar sandwich made with only the fully flavorful and full-on energy sustaining ingredients shown below: whole grain bread; nut butter; choice of honey, jam (fig butter) or cookie spread; fresh fruit; raisins; and chocolate chips.
Power bar sandwich ingredients
Regarding proof under fire, the power bar sandwich you see here – with coffee -…
Power bar sandwich
…sustained me easily, with no need to refuel on the fly, for a 40+ mile North Carolina bike ride.
Click this link or any picture on this page for power bar sandwich picture book directions.
The other day I wanted something a little different for breakfast with flavor and substance to power me through a good late winter Hickory, NC, group bike ride. Here’s what I came up with. I call it scrambled pancake because I used most of the ingredients I use to make a fruit pancake but scrambled the batter like scrambled eggs.
These are the ingredients that I mixed in the bowl you see at the bottom of the picture below.
Those ingredients and rough proportions are (no need to measure precisely: with these ingredients, your result will turn out great): 2 eggs, dash of salt, good shake of ground cinnamon, about 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, 1 big tablespoon of each: ground flaxseed, cooked quinoa (the red grains in the square container above the butter), cooked steel cut oats (the white grains in the square container between the vanilla extract), and a handful of raisins.
Of course, as an improvised recipe, which is just a guide, and I was using what I already had in the fridge, specifically regarding the quinoa and steel cut oats. I can imagine you don’t have those – and possibly not ground flaxseed also – ready to grab and go. No problem: just substitute any or all the grains above with any favorite cooked or ready to eat grain, like cold oat cereal, granola or wheat germ. Your imagination is your only limit.
Here’s how to cook what you’ve mixed.
Add about as much butter as you see above to a frying pan warmed to the same temperature needed to make scrambled or fried eggs. Add and spread the batter, and give the pan a good back and forth shuffle like you see in the last picture above to “encourage” the batter not to stick to the pan surface.
After a 1-3 minutes, when the bottom of the cooked batter looks lightly browned like the top photo above, use a spatula to turn the batter. Don’t worry about trying to turn it all in one piece. (I tried doing that myself – and failed with a smile). Then use the spatula to break and turn the batter, like you would do to make scrambled eggs, until it is cooked through as shown below.
You can then scoop what you’ve cooked into a bowl and add whatever you want want: maple syrup, honey, jam, peanut or any nut butter, yogurt, whipped cream – anything. Next post, I’ll show what I added to make what you see below that easily sustained me for 40 miles on the bike, no problem.
Quinoa (pronounced “keen-wah”) is one of my favorite…seeds. Yah, right away, that’s one of the things that makes it stand out. Quinoa is not a member of the true grain family, like wheat, barley, rye and other “grass grains”. Instead, quinoa, which comes in white, red, and black color variations, is really a seed, and, specifically, it’s the seed of the goosefoot plant shown below.
Goosefoot gets its name from the shape of its leaves and is related to spinach and Swiss chard. Quinoa grows in the South American Andes Mountains, mostly in Chile, Peru, and Bolivia, where it’s been cultivated for over 5000 years. Historical legend has it that Incan armies sustained themselves during long marches on “war balls” made of quinoa mixed with fat. Yes indeed, EMMMMM… Actually, after what I’ve recently learned about fat and how good a lot of it is for us, the idea behind those “war balls” makes good sense.
As you’d probably expect from a relative of spinach and Swiss chard, both exceptionally nutritious leafy greens, quinoa also packs a potent nutritional punch. It has about twice the protein content of barley, corn, and rice. Quinoa is gluten free and easily absorbed by the body. It’s a good source of manganese, magnesium, iron, copper & phosphorous making it particularly noteworthy for people affected by migraine headaches, diabetes, and atherosclerosis. It’s also exceptionally high in dietary fiber and is rich in “good” unsaturated fats like Omega-3. Here are the numbers I got regarding quinoa’s nutrition from a U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) table.
My favorite way to prepare quinoa is to make a batch with what you see below that yields about 2 ½ – 3 cups cooked quinoa. I then put the lion’s share of what’s left over in a sealed container either in the fridge for at least a week, or in the freezer where it lasts like any other frozen food.
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Click any picture on this page for a complete, easy to follow step-by-step picture book “How to Cook Quinoa” recipe.
April 2nd, 2022 
