The 10.000 hours rule is overrated. No training required for these Date Nut Balls.

Making healthy date nut balls don’t take hours of practice. Just look in your cupboards, check your ingredients on Google and a useful recipe will show up. At least, that worked for me!

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Have you heard of the 10.000 hours rule?

They say that if you practice something for 10.000 hours, you’ll become a master at it. Learning to play the violin. Ice skating. Learning to dance the tango. All things I don’t master by the way.
According to this theory, talent’s not so much important, as stamina and persistence to make those training hours are.

Does this imply to cooking?

I don’t think so.

To be honest, I hope it doesn’t.

Because I’m not even close to making those 10.000 hours.
Imagine that you cook 6 nights a week and spend 1 hour doing so. (Don’t laugh Americans, in some parts of the world people actually do this! 😉 ). Well, then it still takes you 10.000/313 days= 33.3(33333333) years to become a good cook.

That sounds too discouraging to be true.

I started to cook when I was 20, and I’m not 53 yet. And yes, I think I am a good cook.
I know what I’m doing in the kitchen and why, and I can explain that to others.

Am I a crazy fast learner?

Nope.

But I cheated my hours by training ‘virtually’. Pretending to be in the kitchen, but instead spend my time reading food blogs, magazines, taking a cookbook to bed. (A bit like I pretended to make my homework, but read a book instead!)
Watching cooking shows can help, either on tv or You Tube. But the best way to become a better cook, for me, was to start my own food blog. Since I wasn’t afraid to ask my readers for help when I got stuck, my Dutch food blog really shows the progress I made over 9 years in the kitchen.

Some dishes that I read about I made myself. Some are still on my wish list. Others I don’t really care for. And with some dishes I’m still wondering why people would make them.

Dishes that I had read about a lot, but never actually made are those “healthy snack balls”. Made of dried fruit and nuts. They always made me think; just eat the d*mn nuts by themselves. But that bag of dehydrating dates made me go for it myself.

I googled words like ‘dates’, ‘nuts’, ‘snack’ and ended up making my version like they at One Green Planet do. But a bit different, of course.

ILLUSTRATION knives by EDIE EATS FOOD BLOG by Edith Dourleijn

Date Nut Balls

Ehrm, no, that’s not an advise to date nutballs. But I’m on the healthy ball snack side from now on. Quick and easy to make, no oven needed. I’m in! 

I used:
1 cup | 140 gr dates
1/3 cup | 45 gr mixed nuts
1/3 cup | 33 gr oats
1 T sesame seeds
1/4 cup coconut flakes + extra

I did:
Soak the dates. I submerged them in some boiling water to dehydrate them a bit. Let them stand for a couple of hours until they were very soft.

Mix all. In a food processor chop the nuts. Add drained dates, oats, sesame seeds and coconut flakes and mix into a firm paste.

Roll the date nut balls and roll them in the rest of the coconut flakes. Let them firm up in the fridge.

That’s it. A quick and nice snack. And no training hours needed!

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