30 Days of Vegan: Date-pecan-oat Energy Balls

 

It's winter- which makes it prime cookie season in the Salmons household. If I'm not making cookies, we're buying cookies and filling up our cookie jar with vanilla sandwich cookies, chocolate-covered graham cracker cookies, coconut chocolate ring cookies, crispy chocolate-coated mint cookies, you name it. One day recently after cookie #5 I realized I needed to do something. As opposed to just eating nuts and fruit all day, I decided to make a cookie-type thing more to my tastes, and came up with this vegan energy ball. 

 Why energy ball? Mainly because all of the ingredients- except for the oats- are pretty potent sources of the main unit of nutritional energy- calories. "Date paste-" which is basically what I'm making in the food processor here- weighs in at 79 cals per ounce. One ounce of "pecan meal" will provide 198 cals. and oat meal, a paltry 19 calories, which is what saves these balls from going a bit too far in that direction. Traditionally, the fruit and nut

components of energy balls are roughly equal. I wanted to combine coconut and pecans and make them grain free, but I'm out of coconut, so decided to go with oats. I'm glad I did- the depth of the toasted oat makes the flavor a bit more complex. Next time I'm looking for a snack with coffee or tea, I'll have no problem swapping a pecan sandy for a couple of these guys.

 Ingredients

• about 8 dates- enough to make roughly 1/2 cup of pureed dates
• 1/2 cup minus 2 tbl pecan halves or pieces
  
• 2 tbl oats- I used rolled quick oats
• dash of salt
• 1/2 tsp vanilla

Method

1. Heat a 10" or smaller skillet on medium heat. after a couple of minutes, put the oats in the pan, spreading them out. Using a spatula or turner, mix the oats around every minute or so. wherever the heat is hottest, you'll begin to see some color. mix it constantly after this for a max of another minute, then remove from the pan to a small bowl. Let them cool. Assemble your food processor.
2. Next, pit the dates if necessary. Snip the dates into 1/2 inch pieces and put in the food processor carafe. Then add the pecans. add the vanilla and salt. 
3. The next step depends on the oats you use. If you use old-fashioned rolled oats, add the oats to the carafe, reserving a teaspoon. I used quick cook which are thinner, so I added a teaspoon of the oats to process along with the other ingredients and reserved all the rest for later. You can reserve them all if you want more whole oats.
4. Process ingredients in pulses until it begins to clump together.
5. Add the rest of your oats and process briefly until oats are incorporated.
6. Form the balls in whatever size you want, but I chose to make mine about the diameter of a nickel, maybe a smidge larger. Quarter-sized might be more standard.

Store in the fridge. They will get a bit sticky over time, but if they start out refrigerated, they still look pretty good by tea time.

I estimate one of the nickel-sized balls to provide about 77 calories. Not bad!