Easy fruit and grain energy bars

Fruit and grain energy bars are protein-rich, delicious and easy to prepare -- a perfect portable breakfast or afternoon snack. 

These easy, homemade fruit and grain energy bars have successfully gotten us out of our current breakfast rut at Casa de Ninj.

Booyah.

They are just the right amount of chewy and not too sweet -- perfect for a grab-and-go breakfast. The danger is that they are so good that I'm tempted to keep making batch after batch.

But eating them constantly would likely get us into another breakfast rut, right? Gaaaaah, when will I learn?!

Changing up the kinds of dried fruit you use in these energy bars keeps them from getting boring. I use dried cranberries and cherries since we have them on hand most often, but I've been known to use dried apricots and plums, too. (Prunes and apricots are a particularly favorite flavor combination of mine, in case you hadn't noticed.)

And if you're not in a breakfast rut, these are still the bars for you. Their portability (and freezability!) make them great afternoon snacks.

Healthy and easy snack recipes

Six healthy and easy, real-food snack recipes to satisfy all your cravings -- sweet, savory, salty, crunchy, chewy and smooth.

If you're looking for some homemade snacks that will satisfy your cravings without that vending-machine guilt, The Ninj has got you covered. Sweet, savory, salty, crunchy, chewy, smooth? The choice is yours.

6 Healthy and Easy Snack Recipes

1. Fruit leather
2. Dried fruit and cereal bars
3. No-bake healthy oat bars
4. Individual yogurt cups (be sure to check the comments on this one for helpful tips!)
   
5. Artichoke hummus
6. Peanut butter banana snack cake

What are your favorite real-food snacks? Leave a comment: The Ninj wants to know.

Dried plum and apricot hand pies

Individual dried plum (prune) and apricot hand pies make a delicious holiday snack or dessert -- and a great alternative to pie.

Regular readers know that I am an avid home cook and food writer -- but they may not know that I came to my calling late in life. I spent little time in the kitchen during my childhood and taught myself to cook from cookbooks, and with some tips from my sister, out of sheer necessity in my 20s (basically, I needed to eat). When I read memoirs from other food writers or hear their stories of learning to cook at a young age from a loving, patient grandmother, I can't relate. Although I grew up in a large Italian family that loved to eat, we did so neither reverentially nor adventurously. Family dinners were simply what happened at six o'clock every evening, rather than a celebration of food or culture.

With five children and a full-time job, my mother viewed cooking as a chore, another task that needed doing each busy day. For her, baking a cake meant opening a box of Duncan Hines, and the microwave was her go-to tool in the kitchen. Understandably, special meals were reserved for holidays.

Yet my father adored food.

Again, he did not love food adventurously. A good steak, steamed lobster with lots of butter and anything that sported a heavy cream sauce were among his all-time favorites. But food played a starring role in his life. Whenever he told stories about places or people, they were ultimately about food – the food served at a memorable event, a special dish from a favorite restaurant, his teenaged job termination based on his preference for dipping into the restaurant's ice cream freezer rather than the dishwater.