A Day in the Park

My dog and I spend lots of time at the park, often sleeping, when the weather is nice. We always pack lots of snacks and water/drinks, but since we had a guest accompanying us, I thought we'd make something a little more fun.

The first thing that came to mind was some sort of fresh fruit spritzer. I'm not sure what that means, but I wanted something with freshly made juice and whatever people mix it with that isn't alcohol (I'm strangely anti drinking during the day). Strawberries sound delightful, possibly because I was eating them when I dreamt up this plan. But I was worried that our guest wouldn't like strawberries, so I went with mangoes instead, as if those are generally more people friendly than strawberries. I also had some Pink Lady apples, my favorites of all time, so I thought I'd use those as well.

In grad school I purchased the Jack LaLanne Power Juicer that I'd been eyeing for months. It was the best $100 I ever spent- back in grad school. I'd use it every day to make tons and tons of juice, but it's been sitting in my cupboard since I moved to the D.C. area. However, that all changed.

After some quick Googling, I found that I should mix 2 parts fruit juice and 1 part sparkling water or wine. I'm not exactly sure what that meant, so I ended up juicing 4 mangoes and putting the juice in a large water bottle, then filling up part way with soda water. The juice that came out was pretty thick but tasty nonetheless. I did the same with the juice of 4 apples. There was no measuring, but a simple taste test at the end indicated I might have gone a little heavy on the soda because the juice seemed diluted, especially in the mango spritzer. Lesson learned.

And, of course, you have to serve it in glass jars. If I wanted to get fancy, I would have frozen some fruit (grapes, strawberries, pineapple) and used them as ice. Or I would have frozen the puree or edible flowers in ice cubes. Or I would have put some chunked fruit on skewers or toothpicks. And garnished with mint. But, that's too much effort when I'm just going ot the park. (I only added the strawberry for the picture).

And since I was having something so sweet, I thought a nice unsweet treat was in order. I happened to finally tune into Get Fresh with Sarah Snow on Discovery Health this week to see her make some oat/peanut butter/cocoa patty goodness. I am choosing to ignore the fact that honey is not really vegan, and I left out the spirulina because I'm just not sure about it yet. And I left out the whole flax seeds and replaced it with more oats because I'm not sure I'll ever use whole flax again. Oh and my oats were really 5-grain hot breakfast cereal.


I halved the recipe and made one set of patties with peanut butter and the other with cashew butter. I went to great lengths not to let the flavors mix. Everything was fine until I decided I had to use both hands to form patties and put on cookie trays. There was chocoloate/nut butter goodness everywhere. No, I'm not complaining, just saying...I finally made the patties and put them in the freezer as long as I could so they'd harden some.

The "cookies" are essentially a very healthy version of the no-bake cookies you had as a kid. I'd like to try adding a little salt to them, but we'll save that for a time when it's just me devouring all of them.

It was perfect for the park, but necessitated some paper towels. Great times.