Granola Bars

Devin and I joke that the boys must get up after we've gone to sleep and decide who is going to like what food items - heaven forbid they make it easy on us and eat the same things! Dakota likes jelly sandwiches and rarely eats peanut butter while Dylan will only eat peanut butter - hold the jelly. One of Dylan's favorite foods is macaroni and cheese. Dakota won't eat anything with cheese and eats macaroni with sauce. Dakota will eat cantaloupe. On one of those getting-to-know-your-child things that always come home at the beginning of the year, Dylan had to write three things he was afraid of. The basement when he's down there alone, nightmares and oh, yea, cantaloupe!

Dylan has recently decided he LOVES granola bars. He's been begging me to buy them. Sometimes he shows great restraint and asks only once a day but most often he asks in the morning packing lunch, after school at snack time and another time thrown in there just to make sure I am perfectly clear that he would really like some granola bars. You'd think I'd break down and just buy some but, no, I've been down this road before and the scenery does not improve with familiarity! As I see it, there are three problems with me going out and buying granola bars. First, they are expensive. Second they are filled with sugar. Third, and most important, if I buy a kind that Dylan likes, Dakota won't touch them and vice-versa. If I buy one kind that I'm sure one boy will like and another kind the other one will like, there's every chance neither one will like them and I'll eat them all myself. If I'm going to eat sugar, I'd rather sacrifice myself on the chocolate altar than waste it on granola bars.

So I dug out my recipe books and found a recipe for granola bars. This way, each boy gets to decide on the spot (and in the case of chocolate chips for Dylan and sesame seeds for Dakota, after generous sampling to make sure nothing was poisoned) what goes into his own granola bars. True to form, they had six ingredients in common (honey, oats, egg, cinnamon and allspice - and some wheat germ I threw in when no one was looking) but Dakota added Craisins and sesame seeds while Dylan wanted peanut butter, chocolate chips and teensy raisins, -which is our fancy name for currants. Here are the results. They smell delicious and hopefully these granola bars will be eaten by the boys and not by me.