Besides a variety of shells, plastic bags, friendly dogs, seagulls and teeny little fish that swished around at my feet in the gentle waves at Hout Bay beach this morning, this is what I discovered: my sister’s crunchy, chewy home-made seed bar recipe. She presented me with a slice as soon as we met up this morning for our beach stint. It was good!
When I asked her to tell me how to go about making it, my darling sister dispensed her recipe as follows:
Nina: I found the recipe in a Greek cookbook on a shoot the other day and it’s so easy – you just melt the sugar and…
Me: How much sugar?
Nina: Well, about 50 grams… and then you add the honey
Me: How much honey?
Nina: About 7 tablespoons
Me: Seven tablespoons?
Nina: No, 4 tablespoons. Anyway, then you dry roast the seeds in a pan…
Me: How do you dry roast them?
Nina: Don’t you know how to dry roast seeds in a pan?
Me: But shouldn’t the nuts and seeds be done first so you can mix them into the melted sugar and honey as it melts?
Nina: Yes, of course, that’s what you’re supposed to do – first do the nuts and seeds…
I think she was rather irritated with all my detailed questions but that’s when I realized the gift that recipe writers bring to the world – that painstaking detail, set out in an orderly fashion to make it easy for any reader to follow. Hooray, I have an important role to play on this little blue planet!
NINA’S SEED BAR RECIPE
Ingredients
Method
- Dry roast your seeds in a non-stick pan on a low heat. Don’t use butter or oil, just pop them in and warm them up slowly until they’re golden in colour. Put them aside in a bowl
- If you’re using nuts, dry roast them next
- Place the sugar in a non-stick pan on a low heat and do not stir it – allow it to melt on its own
- Then add the honey slowly while stirring very gently
- Add the seeds to the mixture and stir
- Pour the mixture out onto a long piece of buttered wax paper or on a buttered marble surface
- Lay another piece of buttered wax paper over the mixture and roll a rolling pin over it so as to flatten and even out the seed bar
- Cut into slices while the seed mix is still warm
- Store in an air-tight container