These rich bars with just five ingredients can be made easily in any quantity you need. They are perfect for sharing with as many people as possible, and in this case hopefully for leaving a sweet taste of Greece in the mouths of those coming through here under very difficult circumstances. One of the five ingredients is packaged cookies (!) it saved a lot of time. We want quantity, and our petite Euro-sized oven would hold us back.
We were hoping to make something that feels like a treat but provides more than purely aesthetic sustenance. These are nothing but dried figs and dates and some sesame seeds, bound with the beautiful perfume of orange blossom water, and held together by a layer of crushed cookies on the top and bottom to make them tidy to eat, and a dusting of powdered sugar so they look more like a confection than a hunk of dried fruits and seeds. Pretty on the outside, healthy on the inside.
This is a recipe that can be incorporated into a weekly schedule and our weekly budget, and that can be doubled or quadrupled, to keep giving throughout the season. It also makes a nice project for small children, combining two of their favorite things- being kind to others, and getting their hands dirty. In our case I have my daughter Mei Mei and her friends to wrap them during study breaks (the are all in high school) and deliver to organizations that can pass them along to the border.
For each large pan (42 X 28 cm), we will need:
1 K/ 7 C dried figs, cut up
500 g/ 4 C dates, pitted
120 g/ 1 C sesame seeds
2 tsp. orange blossom water
some powdered sugar for dusting
1. Crush the cookies. Line a large pan with non-stick paper and oil it very lightly, and spread half of the cookie crumbs evenly on it:
2. Pit the dates- this is very easy. Oil a pair of kitchen scissors and use them to cut the dates into rough pieces, removing the tough nub of stem at the top:
3. If the dates and figs seem too dry to be pulsed into a rough paste in the food processor, you can steam them very lightly- put just a spoonful or two of water into a pot, add the figs, and turn it on to high, covered. As soon as it boils (almost instantly) turn off the heat and let them steam for just a moment.
4. Put half of the dates and half of the figs and half of the sesame seeds into the food processor together with a teaspoon of orange blossom water and pulse until a coarse paste forms. Put into a bowl and pulse the other half and more orange blossom water, then mix the two halves gently so the texture is uniform.
5. The dense paste is not very spreadable, particularly on the crumbs sliding around loose on the non-stick paper. What we will do is take handfuls of the paste, pat them into slabs between our palms, and lay them over the crumbs, working toward the middle and filling in gaps like a puzzle. It is not at all difficult:
6. Coat the top with the rest of the crumbled cookies, pressing them into the fruit mixture. Set it somewhere to dry out a little:
7. Cut into bars large enough to be satisfying, roll in powdered sugar, and wrap them or put them into individual bags to stay clean and fresh.
