More Cheese More Chocolate

I generally think that granola bars are pretty lame.  Most packaged varieties are so dry that you need a tall glass of milk to choke them down, and they’re so insubstantial that you’re hungry an hour later.  The recipes that I’ve tried before have resulted in bars so hard that you fear losing a tooth, and they crumble with your first bite.  So with the exception of my brief love affair with s’mores granola bars around age ten, they’ve never really been my thing.

Even when something isn’t my thing, I occasionally find a recipe with the potential to change my mind.  I’m not sure how I came across this particular recipe, but I’ve had it bookmarked for at least a couple of months.  Each time I would get ready to try it I would realize that I was missing a major ingredient.  First I didn’t have any peanuts, so on my next trip to the store I bought peanuts.  Then I didn’t have crisped brown rice cereal, so I added that to my grocery list.  I’m not sure why it never occurred to me to run down the ingredient list and pick up everything in one trip, but it eventually worked out that I had all of the ingredients, or at least reasonable substitutes, and I made my first successful batch of granola bars.  Bars that I cannot keep my hands off of.  They’re slightly peanut buttery, fairly sweet, chewy, and slightly crumbly with a little crunch.  They’re great as a snack or dessert, and unlike my once favorite s’mores bars, they’re free of things like citric acid and blue #1.

Recipe: Peanut Butter Granola Bars

My changes:

• Roasted, unsalted peanuts + a pinch of salt instead of roasted, salted peanuts
• Pumpkin seeds (slightly toasted in the oven) instead of sunflower seeds
• 1/2 cup Lyle’s Golden Syrup instead of 1/4 cup LGC and 1/4 cup light corn syrup