We Ringers straight up love to snack.
I’ve always been a pretty intense snacker. In fact, some of my favorite foods are snack foods (cheese and crackers, anyone?), and if my meal planning only involved myself, I’d probably just eat yogurt and granola all day, every day. Luckily, I have a husband who enjoys actual meals and probably wouldn’t handle the cheese and cracker lunch diet quite as happily as I would.
But let’s talk about our current snack food of choice: these honey nut granola bars. They are sweet. They are salty. They are crunchy. They are chewy. They are magical.
I’ve been making a variation of these bars every few weeks since November. We’ve tried so many versions of these bad boys: with peanut butter chips, with chocolate chips, thick granola bars, thin granola bars, a complete mess of ingredients that wouldn’t stick together but we ate them anyway granola bars. I first made them for our trip to the Wallowa Mountains over Thanksgiving, knowing we would be doing a lot of driving and hiking, and therefore, a lot of snack eating. They powered us through a long, rainy, snowy hike, and a long, very boring drive across Oregon.
These days, these bars serve as our triathlon training fuel. What? Yeah. We’re training for a triathlon. More on that later. Since Eric does his workouts after work, these sweet and salty bars provide a nice burst of energy to keep him going when dinner is still hours away. And since I can’t seem to go more than 3 hours without eating, these are a nice late afternoon snack to tide me over until Eric gets home. They are a perfect mix of carbs and protein, plus salt to replace all that super gross sweating we seem to be doing.
Best of all, there are only 5 ingredients in these bars, and there’s no baking required! Huzzah! Plus, they are totally adaptable to your tastes. Don’t like plain old peanuts? Swap them out for chocolate chips, or simply replace them with more oats. Don’t like peanut butter? You’re crazy, and you should probably stop reading this blog, since we are a peanut butter guzzling duo.
Now, go forth and snack on. It’s the right thing to do.
- 2 cups old-fashioned oats
- 1 cup pretzel pieces
- ½ cup lightly salted peanuts
- 1 cup creamy peanut butter (look for one with no sugar)
- ½ cup honey
- Line an 8x13-inch pan with wax paper, leaving some overhang on each side to easily lift the bars from the pan.
- In a large bowl, stir together oats, pretzel pieces, and peanuts. In a small bowl, stir together peanut butter and honey.
- Stir the peanut butter mixture into the oat mixture until everything is well-coated and sticky. Press into the lined pan, pushing down with your fingers to make it all stick together.
- Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. Carefully lift the paper from the pan and cut into bars.
- Store in the refrigerator.
-Ally
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