Homemade Sunbutter Bars

Towards the end of this past week, the headlines I kept noticing read: "Brown Rice Syrup puts Arsenic in Organic Food!" (Food Safety News), "Organic Brown Rice Syrup: A Hidden Arsenic Source."  (ABC News), "Study: Organic Rice Syrup Linked to  High-Arsenic Baby Formula." (Environmental Leader).

Organic Brown Rice Syrup?!  Isn't that in a TON of Gluten Free food?!  Agh!  Lately I've been thinking about how we need to go the next step and start making everything we feed out kids (nothing out of the box.), and this was just what I needed to push me to start.  

One thing my kids love and eat weekly, is Sunbutter bars.  They are nice little individually wrapped bars that are free of the top 8 major allergens including gluten, casein and soy.  I've always been hesitant to buy them because they are not organic.  My first project towards "making everything ourselves was to find a nice substitute for my childrens beloved Sunbutter Bars.

I found a wonderful recipe for gluten free energy bars that I was able to adapt to fit all of our needs.  I found the recipe on About.com, Gluten Free Cooking.  Here were my modifications:

• I used Organic Sunbutter.
• I used 1/2 cup of Honey and 1/4 cup of Agave (both organic)
• I used 2 1/2 cups of a combination of organic , raw pecans, almonds, walnuts, sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds.
• I used 10 pitted organic dates.
• Instead of brown rice cereal (seeing as the issue is brown rice syrup) I used 3 cups of Organic quinoa flakes.

I used a small square pyrex glass pan so they came out a little thicker.  Not only did they actually stay together, but they tasted good! (I like them better than the ones we were buying!)

yummy!

I wanted to wrap them each individually so that we could take them with us "on the go".  I wrapped each one with brown unbleached paper and I sealed them with a cute monkey sticker to make it a little more fun for the kids.  I put a few in the fridge and the rest in the freezer.  I figure I can pull some more out on Sundays.  

Here is the final product:

God Bless!

Mommy Provost