Is yours a snack house, or an ingredient house?

A snack house would be those that have a fully stocked pantry with shelves of ready-to-eat items. This house places convenience as the priority and probably shops at Costco to fill their neatly lined baskets with personal size snack bags and other mini containerized items.

There are fruit snacks, healthy chips, and designer bar brands all at eye level. Maybe on top of the fridge you’d find more baskets full of single serve Gatorades, Nutella On-the-Go and Chompps beef jerky sticks. I often find myself envious of the snack house.

In an ingredient house there is often nothing that is ready-to-eat. Even at the most convenient level, the snack will still require some level of preparation.

There is nothing waiting to be ripped open at your fingertips, except a butter knife ready to spread peanut butter on toast. An ingredient house invites (or my kids would argue forces) you to create a snack with the ingredients available to you. Make a quesadilla, or assemble cheese and crackers and an apple.

Top some yogurt with berries and then drizzle it with honey. Spread some almond butter on a banana and then sprinkle it with chocolate chips.

You will often find nothing in a single serve pack in an ingredient house.

As the executive chef, menu planner and grocery supplier of my home kitchen, I get to decide how it runs. And I will tell you, I’ve gone through many (sometimes embarrassing) iterations.

In the early 2000s when I was teaching myself how to cook, I used my mother’s example mixed with a healthy dose of Rachel Ray’s tutelage to get me started. That meant mostly Americana fare. White washed tacos, parmesan chicken and turkey meatloaf.

I was getting my bearings as a cook and teaching myself simple techniques.

Then came the cooking blogs of the mid-2000s where recipes were very accessible, all you had to do was search on Google for the next culinary adventure. Flavors became a little more spiced as I became obsessed with chefs from different cultural backgrounds.

Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey and Ottolenghi all entered my kitchen, replacing the Food Network faves.

As my children began their gastronomic journeys I fell deep into the art of “scratch cooking”. I banned candy and anything prepackaged. I forced myself to make everything from scratch.

This includes bread, crackers, apple sauce, mayonnaise, and even ketchup.

If it came in a bottle or bag, I didn’t want it. And while this period taught me an incredible amount of technique, I nearly drove myself crazy.

Then came the time where nutrition was the only priority. And I mean the only priority. I thought my children would shrivel if they glanced in the direction of Red 40 or even a speck of enriched white flour should taint their pure guts.

Homemade kombucha and sourdough bread lined my countertops. I blame the hormones of motherhood for this phase and I’m truly sorry to anyone who knew me.

In more recent years, we have reached a pleasant balance. We have lots of bottled condiments to choose from but sometimes I still make mayonnaise and salad dressing from scratch, because it tastes good — not because its jarred counterpart is inherently evil. I occasionally make homemade bread, we buy sourdough at the farmer’s market, and we also have regular whole wheat sandwich bread —

store bought in a plastic bag (gasp). I don’t lose a bit of sleep when my kids drink a cream soda at a party or order sprinkles on their Dairy Queen. There are baskets filled with bagged snacks on top of the fridge but I encourage my kids to pair the pretzels with some hummus or the tortilla chips with salsa.

You see, I could never be a snack house. In my opinion, the joy of eating is in large part due to the preparation not in spite of it. Food was never meant to be fast.

We’ve sped up nearly every process in which we eat. What we used to grow, we now get delivered to our doorstep. What we used to cook, we now dump out of a bag and microwave. What we used to assemble, we now tear open and dig in.

And at the risk of sounding preachy, I beg that you slow down if even for a moment. Slice an apple. Put it on a plate. Spoon some salted peanut butter on the side. Make a mug of tea.

Sit down. Take a deep breath.

You won’t find little bags of Doritos or Sun Chips in our snack bins, but I do try to make a batch or two of something at the beginning of the week that can be ready for the hangriest of children. For the moments that food has to be fast or teenage tantrums await.

I’ll throw together granola bars or blueberry muffins, egg bites or these granola balls that my kids have called cookie balls since I can remember.

They’re never uniform in shape and they don’t come in a glossy little bag but they’re there for a ready-to-grab snack in our very Ingredient House.

“But First, Food” columnist Whitney Kling is a recipe developer who lives in Southwest Ohio with her four kids, two cats and a food memoir that’s ever-nearing completion. If she’s not playing tennis or at a yoga class, she’s in the kitchen creating something totally addictive — and usually writing about it.

COCO-DATE COOKIE BALLS

The chewy, satisfying sweetness of dates bind together simple ingredients of oats and coconut that will quickly become your go-to snack. Keep them in the refrigerator and I guarantee you’ll be stealing a couple for a super convenient afternoon pick-me-up.

The recipe:

Makes approximately 2 dozen balls

Prep Time: 10 minutes

Total Time: 10 minutes

What you’ll need:

1 cup pitted dates

1 cup unsweetened shredded coconut

1 cup old fashioned oats

Pinch of salt

Steps:

Add all the ingredients to the bowl of a food processor fitted with the blade attachment.

Blend until you’ve reached the texture of grainy Play0doh.

Mold mixture into 1 inch balls with your hands.

Note: Soft dates will work best here. If you happen to have a drier pack of dates, soak them in very warm water for 5 minutes before draining and adding to the food processor.