Hello, I'm Dr. Theresa Ramsey for eHow.com, and we're gonna talk about ways to make healthy protein bars for kids, and what I like about this the most is that you know every single ingredient in the bar that you'll be eating. So, let's get started. The ingredients are, 1 1/2 cups of oats, 1 1/2 and a half cups of currants or raisins or cranberries, whatever dried fruits you like, 1 1/2 cups of chocolate chips, I chose the mini chips, because we make small bars, 1/2 cup of almonds chopped, 2 to 4 scoops of your favorite protein powder and 1/4 cup of flax seeds, so you have your fiber and your protein and your nuts, and you're good fruits and your oats. So this will be a beautiful protein bar. The liquid portion of the protein bars are made from blueberries, and agave, and maple syrup, erythritol and vanilla extract. I'll tell you more about the ingredients as we go along. And we also need a nut butter, and I like to make my own nut butters, and I'm going to make one today out of pine nuts, and that will be a nice, thick, sticky consistency to the bars along with the maple syrup, and it also gives it a nutty flavor. So, to make pine nut butter, or to make any kind of nut butter, you simply take your nuts and put them into a small blender. I like the ultimate chopper. Then, all you need to do is add oil. I choose to use olive oil for this, you can use any kind of oil that you like. So just drizzle a couple of tablespoons on top of the nuts, and when you blend, you'll know if it's thin enough. If not, you simply add more oil. I like to add a little bit of healthy salt, again, that's sea salt or real salt, has all the minerals the body needs, so it's good for you. It's not like table salt that's white and bleached and all of the minerals are taken out of it. And then you put on the lid, and simply pulse. Take a little bit of time to get the right consistency, and this needs just a little bit more oil, and now our nut butter will be done. Okay. And then, from here, all we have to do is mix our nut butter, the liquid ingredients, the dry ingredients, and then we've got a bar. Okay. So we've got our nut butter, ready to go. So now we'll mix our liquid ingredients, that would be our blueberries, whoops spilling some. Just like at home. And we add our maple syrup. About 1/4 of a cup. Half a cup of blueberries. Here we have a 1/4 cup also of agave extract, low glycemic load, which means it doesn't spike your blood sugar. Erythritol, which is a sugar alcohol you can find in powdered from at health food stores, has no insulin spike in your body. There's zero calories, zero carbs in that. It's a sugar alcohol, very safe to use. And our vanilla extract. So, we take these and we blend them together. Get rid of these bowls for our next part. Again we go to our Magic Bullet, my favorite. These are my two favorite kitchen appliances. So we blend them nicely. And then we add our nut butter into it and blend it all together. So as you see, it's really quite simple, and it's really quite fresh. That's one of the best parts about it is the freshness. And you want to store these in your refrigerator again, because there are no preservatives in them. Okay. So we blend this, and I am quite a messy cooker. I always am. That's because a lot of love goes into my cooking. Okay. So now we need a big bowl. We're gonna mix everything together now. So, here go the oats. We need a big spoon for this, currants, to mix it together. If any, I'll use that one. Tiny chocolate chips. The almonds. I put 4 tablespoons, 4 scoops of protein powder, because I like them higher protein and stay away from the whey and the soy proteins and stick with more the pea and the rice and the hemp proteins as far as quality protein. And then we add our liquid to the dry ingredients. See how easy this is? Mix them together. And sometimes it will look more liquidy, sometimes less, based on whether you use frozen or fresh blueberries, and that will change your cooking time. The more liquid it is, the longer it has to cook, or the bars will far apart. The drier they are, the less cooking time they need. On average, they should cook, 20, 30 to 40 minutes. You just keep an eye on 'em. You don't wanna overcook them and burn them. But this is perfect. And so you wanna now place it into your baking dish. I like to use glass. Spray it with some olive oil, and then just pour your mixture in here, pat it flat, put it in the oven, 20 to 40 minutes based on how thick, how dry or moist your batter is. This one is more on the dry side, so it wont need very much cooking time. Always at 350. And then when you take it out of the oven and it's done, you wanna make sure it cools all the way before you cut it, 'cause it will be kind of gooey, so you wanna let them dry. So this is what will go into the oven, and then you'll let it cool, and then when you're done, the final product is a delicious, homemade protein bar, that kids will love.
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