Don’t worry.

This isn’t one of those recipe posts where you’ll have to scroll endlessly to get to the recipe. You know, the kind where every sentence gets its own line.

Nope.

Not exactly.

OK, almost.

Anyway, here it is:

Essentials:

1. Old fashioned oats (or oat flour)
2. Dates
3. cocoa powder
4. liquid (water works)

Optional add-ins:

1. Peanuts (or peanut butter)
2. Almonds (or almond butter)
3. Protein powder
4. powdered milk

Wow, I can tell a guy wrote this.

Essentials?

Really?
Wait. Excuse me, but, proportions?

How much of all that stuff?

OK, so this is the part where you might have to read a little.

The short answer: it’s an art.

Basically, you have dry ingredients and wet ingredients. You mix them until the batter is a consistency in which you can roll it up into balls … EASILY.

****If it’s caking up in-between your fingers, you need more dry ingredients.

****If it isn’t forming at all, you need more wet

Process

1. Fill your Vitamex with oats. Grind until it’s oat flour
2. Pour oat flour into a large mixing bowl. (Add optional protein powder to this if you’d like and then mix that all up).
3. Stevia – throw a little of that in the flour, too, just in case. Unless you’re the Great Santani, then you don’t want to make anything sweet.
4. Repeat (you can always save extra flour, so make sure you have a lot. If you don’t, you might end up in a situation where you’re hands are sticky and now you have nothing to add to the batter to fix things.)
5. Fill blender 2/3 with dates and a splash of water
6. Blend until smooth. (Just FYI, You’ll probably need to use that stick thing to move the dates around the blender…)
7. Before pouring it out, I like to add in cocoa powder and blend. This would also be the time where I might throw in peanut or almond butter.
8. Pour your dark gu into a different mixing bowl.
9. SIDE TASK: scrape out as much of the wet mixture as possible. You probably won’t get all of it, so this is a good chance to fill up your blender and make a protein shake for later…I just hate wasting anything, so this is what I do).
10. Mix dry to wet.
11. Stir with a spatula until the toddler helping you is ready for middle school.
12. As time endlessly passes before your eyes, carefully observe the nature of this mixture. Restrain yourself from reaching in with your hands (unless you have reached the level of ‘expert protein ball magician,’ as I have) until you’re pretty confident you either need more water or more oat flour.
13. Add whatever thing you think you need more of.
14. Take a risk and put your hands in there. Mix well. Very well.
15. Repeat step 13 as needed.
16. Once you’ve reached this hard-to-describe state of sublime satisfaction, start rolling.
17. Shoot, I should have told you to grab a large Tupperware container before you got your hands messy. Don’t worry, if you forgot to read step No. 17 first, you can always just open your cabinet and clean off the goopy mess you left on the handle some other day.
18. Roll up protein balls and place in the Tupperware. Don’t worry, you don’t really need any wax paper or anything. It won’t matter. At least, whenever I make these it doesn’t.
19. Place in fridge or freezer.

Notes and (important) Reflections:

• You don’t need sugar to sweeten these and you don’t need honey to make it stick. I know this will come as a shock to literally the entire internet, which hosts millions of bakery blogs and such, but I promise you, my protein bars and very, very good. If you think that dates and peanut butter don’t provide enough flavor, I’m going to be honest, it might be time for you to try a month-long celery cleanse. (Oprah Winfrey voice: you get a celery pizza, you get a celery pizza, EVERYBODY GETS CELERY PIZZZZZAAAA)
• One time, I tried making this with day-old COOKED oatmeal mixed into the wet mixture. This ended up making the balls quite a bit wetter than I expected. BUT! I salvaged it by freezing the container, and I’ve been slowly eating them over the last month or two with great pleasure.
• Sometimes I will grind peanuts into peanut butter or almonds and peanuts into an ULTIMATE NUT BUTTER. Depending on how strong you think your blender is, you can do this after you’ve blended the dates. If you do, however, I would recommend NOT filling it up with too many dates. (i.e., fill the blender 1/3 with dates and a splash of water, blend a little, then throw in the nuts and blend some more).
• I made blueberry-based protein balls and used oat flour and vanilla-flavored protein powder. My kids didn’t like it as much…and honestly, I have no idea why.

Hope you like these!