My daughter works in a gym as a receptionist and is pretty health conscious. She was eating her favorite breakfast of oatmeal, peanut butter and flax seeds-- and then added dried fruit that she bought. A lightbulb went on over my head.
“Would you like me to make granola bars for you today so that you can take it to work with you tomorrow?”
“Love it!”
You know what goes into making granola bars? Everything included in her oatmeal breakfast (minus the peanut butter) plus honey, brown sugar, regular sugar, nuts (I had sliced almonds on hand) and butter. So it’s all the good for you stuff PLUS a buttload of fat and sugar.
Oh, they’re so GOOD though. And you can adjust the ingredients a little to make them…well, slightly less fatty and sugary. But compared to oatmeal, definitely not as high on the healthy food scale.
Yep, it crap, but some people want sugar for breakfast and will accept no substitutes --and they don’t seem to be collapsing in the streets, darn it. I’ll gladly have donuts or pastry for breakfast (occasionally), but the wholesome image that granola bar makers promote is bogus and irritating.
Adults need 30-40 grams of protein, and a granola bar usually gives you less than two.
A few times a year I’ll bake breakfast “brownies” that are essentially oatmeal cookies with peanut butter and applesauce substituted for the butter and sugar. Not a perfect substitute for people who crave sweets, but cheap and nutritious.
Sounds like a good idea, VOW, but I have a question. Tomorrow I’ll be serving my kids small bowls of Nutella before sending them off to kindergarten; is there something I could put on it to make it more appealing?
Well, since I don’t care for Nutella, I have no suggestions for improvements/additions to that!
Kindergarten-aged kids are notorious for having strong likes/dislikes, and they choose to exercise those under stressful conditions, like early-morning “get out of the house” occasions.
My granddaughter loves those Babybel little cheeses. So if I wanted to feed K-aged kids and insure they actually EAT something, I’d probably go for a baggie of cheese chunks and mandarin orange segments or grapes…something they can eat in the car
~VOW
I started making them a few years ago using good ol’ alton Brown’s recipe. then I tried using canola oil instead of the butter and Splenda instead of all the brown sugar. You still need to use some regular sugar as the splenda doesn’t have the density/holding strength to hold it together for bars. Very acceptable in cereal bowl form if you back off on the butter and sugar as well.
That would probably work fine. My wife loves the stevia, and it seems to have a very similiar cystalline structure as sucrose so it may even set up enough to cut into bars.
The good news is that you can try it and the worst that can happen is you have breakfast ceral for a few days.
We also LOVE the granola crumbs sprinkled over roasted fruits, like apples, half a peach, etc. Great tasting stuff and good for you too!
When I taught myself to make an ancestral Irish recipe—oat cakes, which are the ancient bread of Ireland, Scotland, and the north of England—I realized that here was the forerunner of our modern granola bars. They are quite different recipes, but the kinship is plain to see.
