Yesterday I rode my bike 36.5 km. What a painful ride! It’s definitely not the longest bike ride I’ve ever had, but it was the toughest. And I have no clue why. Okay, maybe I do. Probably the last two lazy ride weeks have not helped my endurance. Most of the rides the last couple of weeks have been short, maybe 8 or 12 km longs. Far short of the 25-30 km a day goal I set for myself a few months ago. The rides have also been on familiar and comfortable terrain — the grocery store, Mount Pleasant Cemetery, the Beltline. None are too challenging and they are all very familiar routes. I know exactly when to push myself and when I can coast. And I have to admit I’ve done a lot more coasting recently. I can’t even blame the hot humid weather because there hasn’t been much of it. Fresh rainy mornings, overcast mild afternoons, and few sunny and hot sticky days. Not stressful, not straining.

Well, enough of that! How am I going to complete a metric century this season with that kind of lacklustre performance? Foot, meet backside. Alright, I’ve given myself a whoomp on the butt. Time to push myself forward on the training path.

To help encourage and feed my enthusiasm on my bike, I’m trying a new energy bar recipe I found in issue 34 of Momentum Magazine. I’ve adjusted it to suit my sweet tooth.

NRG Bars Remix

I used:

4 1/2 cups Kashi Go Lean! Crunch cereal 

3 cups sesame seeds

1 cup medium shred unsweetened coconut

1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

1/2 cups of roasted almonds, lightly crushed

1 heaping tablespoon finely ground coffee beans

1 cup crunchy natural peanut butter

2 cans (600ml) of sweetened condensed milk

Preheat your oven at 300 F

Mix the the dry ingredients except for the coffee beans in a large mixing bowl.

In another mixing bowl carefully combine the peanut butter and 2 cans of sweetened condensed milk, then add the ground coffee beans.

Add the wet mixture to the dry mixture and combine completely. This will be sticky and the sesame seeds have a tendency to fall to the bottom of the bowl so definitely keep stirring from the bottom to the top. Use to spoons if you have to. 

On a 11X17 inch pain place a sheet of parchment paper. Butter or spray the parchment. Then press the mixture onto the pan. It’s very sticky so I spooned the mix first onto the parchment then pressed it down, evening out the mixture on the pan.

Place in 300 F oven and leave it for 20 minutes.

Take out of oven. Let cool completely before cutting into squares. I wrapped mine in clingwrap because that’s what I had in the cupboard. It made 30 generous sized squares. 

The total cost was approximately $15.00. 

These are tasty! Sweet, chewy, with a nutty chocolate burst of flavour. Dang, they are yummy. The next batch I’ll make I’m going to up the coffee beans amount. I’m thinking 2 tablespoons. I’ll also add a scoop of chocolate protein powder. I wonder if I can substitute something for the second can of sweetened condensed milk? More research!

I hope you’ll give these a try. You can use lots of different ingredients in exchange of the coconut, almonds, and chocolate. I’m not a big fan of dried fruit, but the original recipe called for banana chips and raisins. I bet dried apples, cranberries, nutmeg, dried apricots, and even trying flavoured coffee beans like hazlenut would make tasty energy bars. If you are allergic to peanuts try sunflower seed butter if you can. And switch the Kashi Go Lean cereal for granola or toasted oatmeal flakes. It’s an easy recipe to personalize.

I have absolutely no idea what the calorie count is or have any nutritional information about the recipe. It won’t trim your waistline on it’s own, that’s for sure. But I’m hoping it’ll give me that little bit of oomph in the energy department when I am approaching kilometre 70 of my metric century!