EatOrToss Flexipe: This recipe can bend and twist for easier, waste-minimizing cooking.
We were moving. And hoping to eat up as much as possible in our kitchen before it was time to pack everything up. And we were busy and needed quick, convenient things to eat. And there were lots of little annoying things that didn’t seem worth packing: a half-eaten bag of dates, some shredded coconut, a quarter bag of walnuts, frozen bananas, a can of pumpkin puree.
This is where the lightbulb went off. These things were all just dessert-y enough that I dropped them into the blender just to see what would happen. We were almost out of pumpkin pie spice, so I dumped all we had in there too. Then, I spread the blended concoction in a baking dish and put it in the freezer. Soon enough we had nutrition-packed frozen treats at the ready for emergency snacking, which comes up often in the chaos of moving! And we no longer had to worry about packing all those edible odds and ends.
If only this trick worked with the junk drawer.
Whether you’re moving or just trying to clean out your cabinets, these bars are heavy lifters—they’ll help you use things up, while providing quick and healthy snacking.
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Moving Truck Freezer Bars
Description
Use up nuts, bananas, pumpkin puree, yogurt, coconut, peanut butter, nutella, nut butters, dried fruit, pumpkin pie spice, cream cheese, and beyond!
Ingredients
- Base ingredient. Something with body, like pumpkin puree or frozen bananas. You could toss in some yogurt here too. For richer bars, you could use a lot of nut butter. Everything will freeze up solid, but the more solid your base ingredients, the longer it will take for the bars to lose their shape once you take them out of the freezer.
- Coconut and/or other nuts. Anything goes! If the nuts aren’t roasted, I like to toast in the oven before adding them.
- Dried fruit. Dates? Cranberries? Raisins?
- Random frozen fruit? Bananas for banana bread that never happened? Blueberries from your picking expedition last summer? Citrus peel zest that you never got to?
- Spices. Whatever sounds appealing to you is the answer here! But, if you’re trying to clean out your kitchen, target the spices that are almost empty, especially if they’re ones that you’re unlikely to use for a long time.
- Anything else? Look around your kitchen for odds and ends that would be at home in your freezer bars. Is there only one spoonful left in your jar of peanut butter? Do you have some stray chia seeds? Coconut milk? Honey? Jam? Chocolate? Any other fruit that would lend itself to freezing? Cream cheese? Salami? (Kidding on that last one, but you know what? We won’t judge.)
Instructions
- Round up your ingredients, put them in a blender in an order that makes sense to you and then blend away.
- Pour the blended mix into a baking pan. I used a nine-by-nine square pan with high edges. Then, pop it in the freezer and wait for the mixture to harden.
- Cut the frozen tundra into bite-sized squares. Store them in the freezer for quick snacking, as needed. As you’ll see in my image, I found neat and tidy squares hard to pull off, but I wasn’t going for presentation. These were hard workers that helped us through our move!
