Bionic Kitty Ears and Almonds and Other Fun Snacks

While doing our little bit of grocery shopping this weekend, little because we were on a really really really tight budget and no, you can't have that and you can't have that because we can't afford it this week, we looked around the crunchy granola organic section of Save Mart and found a few healthy low carb diet friendly products to try.

First off I found this big bag of almonds at a fairly reasonable price of $6.99. Almonds are expensive but you get a lot in this bag and they are grown right here in CA so I'm helping out the almond growers here in our state, and almonds are a good for you snack and they have lots of good things inside them. These are Golden Gate brand, and all that is in them is almonds, olive oil, and sea salt. No spray on flavors or weird tasting preservatives. Just roasted almonds. Packed in Ripon, CA, which I don't know where that is and I'm too lazy to google it right now, but wherever Ripon CA is, these are by far the best tasting almonds I've ever tried! No, I did not get any free almonds for my testimonial, but if the Golden Gate Nut Company would like to SEND me some free almonds I certainly wouldn't turn them down.

So, now we've got almonds, but the handy dandy reclosable bag that they come in sounds EXACTLY like the bag that the cat treats come in and all I have to do is barely touch the cat treat bag and in a split second I have six cats milling about waiting for their treats. So last night I was really hungry and thought I'd have some almonds and had to give six cats their treats not once but twice because after my first handful of almonds I went back for more. Today I will put the almonds into some other container so that I can eat them without six cats thinking I am eating their treats.




I found a few more snacks we tried. These granola bars are made by Nature's Path, and they are organic, have lots of whole grain in them, and omega 3's and have some protein and are low sodium, and dang, do these taste good! We tried the pumpkin-n-spice flavor first, then the next day I went back for the apricot and yogurt ones. They also make other flavors but Save Mart only has these two kinds. Very very tasty, and again, Nature's Path, free ones would be just fine. These are a little more expensive than most granola bars, but for the quality and taste and lack of junky stuff in them, pretty much worth the price.


Then I found a bunch of these bars made by Kind, about 6 or 7 different flavors, and the low glycemic index and 5g of fiber made me want to try these. They are also gluten and wheat free, low sodium and no sulphur dioxide. They are a little pricey at about $1.59 each, but dang, are these good! Good like candy bar good! I had one that had pineapple and coconut in it and it was yummy indeed.


We were also looking for lemonade for Keith, the doctor told him to drink a glass a day but I forget what for, something about acid? I don't know, but as we are reading the ingredients in the lemonades, and yes, we could make our own, but come on now, I'm LAZY like that, we find that all of them are sweetened with high fructose corn syrup. Not good. We found this Simply Lemonade that is simply that, lemonade made with real sugar. And it's good, a little tart, but good. A little more expensive than the corn syrupy lemonades, but again, worth it.


Moral of the story? Sometimes it's good to pay a little more when it comes to eating healthier.

I'm Tired

I actually got a lot done this morning, surprise, surprise. We did our grocery shopping last night, so today I organized all the stuff we had crammed in the fridge, cooked chicken for salad, made deviled eggs for Keith's lunch box this week, cut up celery, washed the lettuce and put it in a bowl to stay crisp, made the chicken salad, vacuumed the living room, did laundry, even the bed sheets, and made these granola bars.

A while back I searched the internet for a granola bar recipe without quite so much sugar and weird palm oils and whatever else they put into the commercial granola bars, which, by the way, have gone up in price this week. I found this recipe and tried it out, but on the next go-round added a little more honey because these bars crumble a lot and I thought more honey might make them stick together a little better.


Here's the recipe:
4 1/2 cups rolled oats
1 cup all purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla extract
2/3 cup butter, softened (really soft works best)
2/3 cup honey
1/3 cup packed brown sugar ( I use the splenda brown sugar blend)
2 cups mini chocolate chips (or whatever you want, I've used white chocolate and cinnamon chips, and this time I used some trail mix that we had)

Preheat oven to 325. Lightly grease one 9x13 pan. I use the big glass rectangle casserole pan thing, not sure if it's 9x13 or what, it's like what you would make lasagne in, if you are one of those that actually makes lasagne.
In large mixing bowl, combine everything but the chocolate chips and mix, mix, mix, mix, mix with a big wooden spoon-this takes a little while and a little elbow grease.
Add the chocolate chips or whatever and mix them in.
Lightly press mixture into the prepared pan, bake at 325 for 18-22 minutes.
Let cool a little while, cut into bars.
Eat.

These still come out kind of crumbly, but they taste pretty good, and I guess you could doctor up the recipe with added spices, coconut, whatever.

Anyway, after all that kitchen stuff I was hot and sweaty and had to go take a shower.

Now I'm ready to do what Buddy and Mimi (and all the rest of the cats) are doing.


Buddy is laying right in the doorway to the bathroom. So that we have to step over him if we want to use the bathroom. I think they do this on purpose.


And Mimi is smack in the middle of the bed that I just put clean sheets on. Apparently the light is just a little too bright, I love the way she covers up her eyes!