Revolutionizing snack time.

For some reason during the last 6 or so months I've begun to enjoy baking. I never made time for it before but enjoy making interesting and healthy foods for Mateo. It started with trying all these fairly healthy muffin recipes from weelicous.com. There were sweet potato muffins and carrot apple coconut muffins and a plethora of others. I liked the idea of adding in healthy veggies and fruits for my picky eater. They freeze well and are easy to pull out for a healthy breakfast or snack for Mateo (or me!).

Lately I've been learning how to do a few more traditional snacks that not only contain ingredients that I can pronounce and already have (most of) in my cupboards but they're also fun, healthier, and easy to freeze. Besides the time factor I like to double batches to freeze extra because....to be honest....I hate doing dishes. My least favorite chore and of course I often feel like I am doing dishes all day long. Breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, etc. So it's really no more work to double the batch because I only have to take out all of the ingredients and clean up everything once.

The last couple of years I've also really tried to cut back on unhealthy food addivies like artificial sweeteners, high fructose corn syrup, MSG, etc. All of these have real ingredients in them and are much cheaper than buying a natural snack version.

A few of the snacks I've made recently are:

Oatmeal on-the-go bars (I added chocolate chips to mine :) Picture coming soon. These are the easiest of the recipes and I think they'd be the easiest/most doable for working moms though any of them could be a weekend project with the kiddos. The other three require making a dough and do take a little longer but this one you literally just throw all the ingredients in a big baking dish and cook it. Then cut apart and freeze. Super easy. You can defrost them over night or just in the microwave when you want one. You can choose your own ingredients as far as nuts, dried fruit, chocolate, etc. are concerned too. Mateo doesn't love these, unfortunately, but I do. I haven't given up that he will learn to like oatmeal...

Whole Wheat Cheddar Crackers (like goldfish crackers)

I happened to have a tiny fish cookie cutter but with a double batch of this somewhat crumbly dough I ended up doing mostly bigger crackers.

I used a large teddy bear cutter for the rest and froze quite a few of these cheesy teddy bear crackers. I LOVE that this recipe only has cheese, whole wheat flower, and butter. That's it! NO additives like MSG or even salt. To spice things up at snack time I put some spreadable cheese (like laughing cow or whipped cream cheese) and some flax seeds for the "sprinkles".
These were so good! Though I do admit they are a little bland...probably because there is no salt in the recipe. I suppose you could add it but I like them how they are. I think I will be eating these more often than Mateo.

Graham Crackers (which we call cookies b/c Mateo will eat anything that's called a cookie)These were so tasty that it was a little hard to freeze some of them because I could have eaten them all. Next time I might just cut them into rectangles like traditional graham crackers, but Grandma and I turned this into a project for Mateo... who loves to use cookie cutters and wear his apron and chef hat. My mom made up some simple powdered sugar frosting with cinnamon too but you could eat them plain like crackers.

Animal Crackers (also called cookies at our house haha)

Mateo loved eating cookies in different animals shapes. And of course, he enjoyed biting limbs off the animals. These froze really nicely and make a good snack with some fresh fruit or a smoothie. I love these myself, too!

Next one to learn: Chocolate Chip Granola Bars