Happy Snacking Choices for the Home Office

How to stay fueled and productive in the Covid-19 Era

The home office just became an essential part of daily life due to the Covid-19 pandemic.  Many people have set up new work routines while trying to juggle their kids home from school.  Napa Nuts is here to provide a few snacking tips to make each day just a bit easier by taking away the hunger pangs.

Productive Home Office

Napa Nuts has already looked into how to set up snacks in the office break-room.  Now many people have the option to have the break-room within arm’s reach of the workstation. This could be both a curse and a blessing depending on which choices get made.  We are here to help you make informed decisions about how best to set up your home office for comfort, convenience and productivity.

Here at Napa Nuts, we are huge fans of Trail Mixes. We spend a lot of time thinking about our blends. We consider the flavor profiles between sweet, salty, crunchy, and chewy. We think we have this down to a science and our repeat customers seem to agree with us.

If you are trying to stay healthy, one of the best choices for snacking are raw nuts. We have already covered all the reasons that eating nuts is healthy for you in a previous blog so we won’t cover all of that again. The basic summary is that healthy fats and protein are good for you.

Our top recommendation is the Raw California Blend of mixed nuts. We have all California grown pecans, almonds, walnuts, and pistachios. All of these nuts are individually sought after for their crunch and nutty flavor.

Raw California Mixed Nuts

Trail Mixes with no or low added sugar are also a great choice. The dried fruit will add a bit more sweetness and chewiness to your snacking. The natural sugars found in fruit are a great energy boost and still give you the vitamins found in raw fruit. We mix our trail mixes every few days so anytime it is ordered someone is getting a fresh trail mix that hasn’t been sitting in a bag for months on the market shelf.

Our California Blend trail mix is a wonderful mix of dried fruit including raisins and apricots with some California grown nuts. We also offer the Performance Blend trail mix which was designed for elite athletes. Only raw nuts and natural sugars in this one.

Performance Blend Trail Mix

Many people are trying to avoid added sugars right now. Some studies have shown, however, that there can be some benefits to eating Dark Chocolate. In order to get some of these health benefits, we recommend our Valley Blend Trail Mix. This one has natural fruit, some raw nuts, and some dark chocolate. There is no actual definition for “superfood”, but this counts in our book.

Valley Blend Trail Mix

Snack safely, and snack often. With love, Napa Nuts

How Napa Nuts is Dealing with the COVID-19 Crisis

Hi Fans,

We want to tell you the story of our small business and what we have done in this new world. We are writing this partially for information and partially for catharsis. The speed at which this new world snuck up on us is still hard to believe. I hope readers will find this story informative and that the reality of this current paradigm will be very short-lived.

Instead of just complaining, we would like to start with the positives. Fortunately, we don’t have to look far for the bright side of this situation.

Firstly, we have gained a ton of new customers. These are mostly individuals who had not heard of us before or who previously chose to go out to get the products we sell from the grocery store. We love having new customers and the current rate of people making their first orders with us is unprecedented. This is largely due to our social media presence and all of the people like you who have chosen to tell friends to support this family owned business.

In addition, we have seen more offers from people to help promote us. Happy customers have shared posts, passed out postcards, and even written about us on their websites. This abundance of love and support should provide us all with hope for the future.

We are also getting a lot of personal thank yous from people. The best ones, while they are all appreciated, are the ones with the pictures of adorable kids enjoying our products.

As an essential business, we have been able to keep a normal schedule of going to work, filling orders and making some deliveries. As our business model is changing from mostly selling to other businesses to selling mostly to individuals, we have also had some free time in the office to make some improvements to our webstore. We recently completed tagging “Healthy Choices” so that can now be searched on our website. If you have to stock up on non-perishables for your Stay-At-Home isolation, we want people to stay healthy.

Unfortunately, this crisis has also brought some challenges to our company. For the first time since our parents bought the business almost 30 years ago, staying open is a question, not a given. For the first time, we have had to lay off some staff because so few of our normal customers are ordering. These are people who have worked hard for us for years and who we treat like family. We miss them and can only hope they are ok and that government bailouts will help them pay their bills. We have committed to continue to pay their health insurance premiums for as long as we can.

Business has been anemic. Just for comparison, a week’s worth of orders from individuals is roughly equivalent to one of the normal weekly orders from one of our largest customers.

The uncertainty of the length of this crisis is also troubling. We are hoping that we make enough income to stay open but many of our customers are closed. The money that we are owed from a month ago or so may or may not ever get to us. In addition to our own stress of trying to stay open, with the income greatly reduced, we are also having to make hard choices on which vendors we are going to pay. These are companies we love working with and who we rely on for our livelihood. It feels terrible to not be able to do more to sustain them as well.

With the continued support of our customers, new and old, we are hoping to weather this storm. Thank you all for your continued support.

Sincerely,

Bonnie & Schecky

Recipe: Mighty Bars!

While you are home sheltering in place, you may as well make some healthy snack food for your family. This recipe for all raw Mighty Bars was made at our house this week and they are delicious!!!! Make sure you buy your ingredients at Napanuts.store .

Mighty Bars

Ingredients:

3 cups almonds

3/4 cup pumpkin seeds

1 1/3 cups sunflower seeds

3/4 cup sesame seeds

1 cup + 2 Tablespoons coconut flakes

2/4 cup hemp seeds

1/2 cup flax seeds

2/3 cup goji berries

2/3 cup cacao nibs

1 1/4 teaspoons salt 1 vanilla bean (scraped insides only)

3/4 cup agave syrup

3/4 cup cacao butter

3/4 cup almond butter Chocolate for dipping (see attached recipe)

Directions:

Lightly process the almonds until about a quarter of them are still mostly whole. Using a coffee grinder (or blender), finely powder the flax seeds and half of the sesame seeds

Blend the scraped vanilla with melted cacao butter. Combine all dry ingredients in a bowl and toss until well mixed. Add the blended cacao-vanilla butter, agave syrup, and almond butter and mix by hand until all ingredients are thoroughly combined.

Remove 3 cups of the mixture and process until it is mostly broken down. Add back to the rest of the mixture and thoroughly re-incorporate.

On a cutting board form the mixture into a block 8x8x2 inch. Keep thickness as consistent as possible, and smooth over the top and sides with a spatula. Using a large sharp knife, cut the block into whatever size pieces you wish (24 to 34 pieces total are good sizes). Once bars are cut, set on a baking sheet and place in fridge or freezer to chill for 30 minutes or longer before dipping in chocolate.

Once bars are chilled and chocolate is ready, dip a half-inch of the bar in the melted chocolate (see attached recipe). Place the dipped bars on the baking sheet and set in fridge or freezer until chocolate is hard. The dipping in chocolate step can be omitted and the bars are still delicious. Save the extra chocolate sauce in the freezer or refrigerator for the next batches of Mighty Bars.

Store in fridge or freezer. They will keep for several weeks in the fridge, and a very long time in the freezer.

Raw Chocolate

(makes about 6 cups chocolate enough for 3 batches of Mighty Bars. It will last for at least four months in the refrigerator, longer in the freezer. Gently re-melt to re-use)

Ingredients:

3 ½ cups cacao butter

4 Vanilla Beans or 2 tablespoons Vanilla

1 cup + 3 tablespoons powdered sucanat (finely ground in coffee grinder)

1/3 cup agave syrup

¾ teaspoon salt

22 ounces cacao powder (weight)

Directions:

Blend the melted cacao butter and vanilla.

Pour 2 cups of the blended cacao butter in a food processor (leave the remaining 1 ½ cups in the blender). Add to the food processor half the amount of cacao powder and process for about 1 minute.

Stop to add the salt and powdered sucanat.

Resume processing (1 minute) Resume blending the remaining 1 ½ cups vanilla-butter. While blender is running, slowly pour in the agave and blend until well combined. Add the blended cacao butter with agave to the food processor and resume processing (1 minute).

Stop to add the remaining cacao powder and process for an additional 2-3 minutes, scraping the sides with a spatula.

Want to give this a try? Here is a link to all of these featured products from the Napa Nuts’ Store.

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Did you try the recipe? Show off your mighty bars in the comments.