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.

10-minute cherry and chicken couscous salad

Pair sweet, ripe cherries with savory grilled chicken and crunchy granola in this summer salad recipe that takes only 10 minutes to prepare. No need to turn on the oven for this easy and healthy weeknight meal salad!

There's a reason you're seeing so many salads showing up lately on food blogs and cooking shows. Well, there are three big reasons:

1) Salads showcase seasonal summer produce.

After a long winter of hot-house tomatoes and root veggies, we go a little cray cray with all the fresh produce at our fingertips from CSA shares, farmer's markets and local produce stands. Tomatoes that taste like tomatoes and not like cardboard? Why yes, I'll eat them with every meal. I'm guilty of adding a salad as the side and vegetable to nearly every dinner I make during the summer -- so fresh, so delicious, so easy.

2) Salads don't require you to turn on the oven.

Done and done. Maybe it's too hot outside ... or maybe you'd just rather be outside. Either way, a meal salad means you don't really have to cook and you can still have a delicious, healthy and satisfying meal. Yeah, how cool is that?

3) Salads are easy to prepare.

Really: Do I need a supporting paragraph here talking about how much we love quick and easy weeknight recipes? No, I didn't think so.

So be prepared to see more summer salads from The Ninj this year. Like this cherry and chicken coucous salad, which meets all the awesome criteria above: it's full of sweet, ripe, summer cherries; you don't have to turn on the oven; and you can make it in 10 minutes.

Yes, you read that correctly: TEN-MINUTE cherry and chicken couscous salad.

Tart cherry cocktail

Ready for a more modern take on the classic Cosmopolitan?

You've probably heard a lot about tart cherry juice lately. The new darling of the morning show health segment, tart cherry juice is making big headlines for its anti-inflammatory properties – all the benefits of arthritis meds but wicked tastier.

Leave it to The Ninj, then, to turn this new healthy superfood into a cocktail.

I created this tart cherry cocktail for Serious Eats and it's the perfect drink for Valentine's Day. Well, for any day, in my book, but I'm going with a theme here.

Head on over to my post at Serious Eats to learn how to shake up a tart cherry cocktail for you and your honey.

Port and cherry brownies

Rich and decadent round brownies made with ruby port and tart dried cherries.

I got a recipe for boozy cherry brownies delivered straight to my inbox. Booyah. If that's not fate, I don't know what is.

As a food blogger, I get slammed on a daily basis with press releases and other marketing emails, wanting me to promote/review/check out whatever food-related item or information is being hawked.

Most of it is crap, but every once in a while, there's a diamond in the crap pile. Recently, the diamond was this brownie recipe.

Since the recipe comes directly from Dorie Greenspan, I knew it would be foolproof. And since it's made with port wine, bittersweet chocolate and tangy dried cherries, I knew it would be completely awesome.

And it is.

I love that they are made in muffin tins which makes them not only round (Dorie calls them "broundies") but also cutely personal-sized without the jaggedy cut edges of pan brownies.

Dried fruit and cereal snack bars

I really don't think you can have too many recipes for snack bars. I mean, really: What other food can stealthily morph from a grab-and-go breakfast to energy bar to sweet dessert, all in one day and without changing shoes?

(You know The Ninj loves stealthy food, especially snacks. And shoes.)

Mind you, this snack bar should not be confused with either a rice krispy treat (too sweet) or a granola bar (too, well, granola-y). It is neither, yet it is both.

I love that it is loaded with dried fruits, nuts and grains yet still offers enough sweetness to seem more like a treat. And the puffed cereal provides just enough chewy-crunchiness to round out the whole dealy.

Oh, hold the phone: DID I MENTION IT'S A NO-BAKE BAR?

Booyah.

Roasted sour cherry sauce

I had never eaten sour cherries until this summer.

Given that we have sour cherry trees in the wee orchard of the farmette we bought two years ago, you would think I would have eaten them last year.

But no.

Last year was pretty craptacular for our fruit trees. We had nearly no apples and not a single pear, based on a late spring frost that damaged all the blossoms (not to mention the pear-loving deer). We had a peach tree, mateless and pathetic, so no fruit there.  There were also two plum trees which were the wrong types to cross-polinate with each other. And the sour cherry trees just yielded what looked like pits on stems.

Additionally, last year we were new to our farmette and still figuring out how to care for all these trees and plants -- in fact, I spent much of last year simply trying to identify what we had so that I could learn how to care for it. I spent more than one of what I call "What the Hell Is This Day" at the local nursery: I bring in photos of the plants in my yard and ask the nursery workers, "What the hell is this?"

But, so far, this year has been better. We're managing pests and diseases, and I've read up on how to care for the orchard. So imagine my delight when the trees actually starting producing fruit that looked edible.

Cherry chocolate Greek yogurt cookies

Cherry chocolate Greek yogurt cookies

It's Valentine's week: guess how much I love my readers?

I'm giving you a delicious, healthy cookie post -- while I'm on vacation.

That's how much.  I didn't want to leave you hanging when there's a sugar-based holiday fast approaching.

I came up with this recipe at the tail end of Detox January; during the last week, I was craving sweets but didn't really have any new healthy (well, healthier) cookie recipes to try. I poked around Pinterest a bit and found a recipe for a Greek yogurt and fruit-based cookie, but it had a big slathering of icing on the top -- not very detoxy.

So I made up my own.

What I like about this recipe is that it is flexible; you can use any combination of fruit and yogurt to really customize your cookies. I used black cherry yogurt and dried cherries because that's what I had on hand. What about mango yogurt and bits of dried mango, maybe with some white chocolate chips thrown in for good measure? Or blueberry yogurt with frozen blueberries and some lemon zest or candied citrus peel?

You can see that the possibilities are nearly endless.

Cherries in wine: a recipe

Cherries in wine

It's challenge time again!

For those of you who have been playing along at home (or at least watching me do so), you know that I'm referring to Grow It Cook It Can It's Cook It! 2012 challenge. We've made and shared so many awesome staples and recipes so far: pasta, bread, butter, cheese, lactofermented veg (pickles), jam and now fruit canned in light syrup.

I can hear you laughing now: only for the Ninj would wine constitute "light syrup."

But I swear, Caroline gave us permission to booze up our fruit, so it counts!

This has been a crazy busy month for me so, although I had visions of jar after jar of peaches and apricots lining my basement shelves, I wound up only having time to do a small batch of cherries before I missed not only the posting deadline but also all the good summer fruit entirely.

But this recipe, from Eugenia Bone's Well-Preserved, looked very versatile -- how many other preserved foods can you use on both beef tenderloin and ice cream in the same meal?