Gnu Bars

Ok, so I've groused about how I'm an old lady and thinking about such old lady things like fiber, but the other day, I was on LifeHacker and saw a link to a discussion on Ask MetaFilter for recommendations on a good Power Bar-like bar that you can have as a mid-day snack that wasn't so gross. Various people recommended the Gnu Bars by Gnu Foods.

Check out the ingredients for the Orange Cranberry bar:

Gnu High Fiber Blend ™ (Organic whole wheat flour, oats, wheat bran, psyllium, flax, millet, soy flour), fruit juice, natural grain dextrins (a natural and unmodified starch), canola oil, raisins, apples, plums, cranberries, rice, natural flavors, aluminum-free baking powder.

Here is the nutritional info:


Sounds great! The only real worry was what it would taste like. I ordered a month pack (best deal), which arrived yesterday. So far, I've had an Orange Cranberry one and a Banana Walnut one. Both of them are delicious and taste like actual food, and have a good chewy bite to them. Feels like a granola bar, except not glued together with honey and sugar. I haven't tried the Cinnamon Raisin one yet, but I have high hopes.

Food for thought.

Two items:

Ei-Nyung suggested a new franchise for Mexican food made from octopus:

* Tako Taco

I had an idea for a korean-fusion burrito:

* Bi Bim Burrito

Tell me those aren't awesome.

Dinner

Joe made us some excellent chicken fajitas. Man, the thighs are the way to go. Breasts never, ever turn out as well, IMO. Sure, they're less fatty, but so much less satisfying. Anyway, excellent fajitas.

After dinner, Christy and Eric had brought over some strawberries & chocolate. So, itching to try out our new food slicer/shredder attachment for the KitchenAid (it's not a unitasker! It slices AND shreds), we ran the chocolate through the fine shredder. Awesome. The end result was about double or triple the volume of the original bar, in little tiny pieces.

A couple weeks ago, Alan & I had gone on some lazy weekday afternoon, to a cafe on College called Bittersweet. We had a pair of drinks there - I had a white chocolate & cardamom thing, and Alan had a hot chocolate spiked with some cayenne.

Tonight, with the shredded chocolate, some milk, and the milk steamer on the espresso machine, we duplicated both those drinks, and they were delicious. The cayenne gives the chocolate some punch - it's like the fat from the chocolate coats the front of your mouth, while the cayenne kicks a hole in the back of your head. Tasty!

The white chocolate & cardamom drink is weirder, because frankly, I'm not used to the flavor of cardamom in anything but Indian curries. So, that flavor in a sweet, creamy white chocolate drink is very odd at first, but quite compelling. It's nice to know we can do this sort of thing with the equipment we have. Obviously not the intended use, but a great result nonetheless.