We’ve been having kitchen fun.  Snow and cold temps have returned with the latest arctic blast so we are making do with browsing recipes online.  Granola bars caught Mrs J’s attention the other day so we looked over a few recipes to get an idea of what would work and then went to the cupboard for ingredients.  We pretty much cleaned out all the odds and ends leftover from other recipes and ended up with some tasty snack bars.  Rolled oats are featured in most of the recipes we looked at, and peanut butter and honey were pretty common.  From memory, here are the ingredients we went with this morning:

1-1/2 cups old fashioned rolled oats

1 cup peanut butter

1/2 cup honey (plus a drizzle of maple syrup we had left from waffles)

and enough of these to make up three additional cups of filler:

pecans

dried cranberries

raisins

chopped dates

chocolate chips

toasted coconut

Melt the peanut butter in a small saucepan and add the honey and other liquids that sound good. (I had planned to add a little cherry preserve but forgot.)  I spun the dry stuff in a food processor to mix it and chop some of the larger pieces a bit then dumped it into a large mixing bowl.  Add the peanut butter mixture and mix thoroughly, then press it into a pan that you have lined with parchment paper.  Mrs J used a plastic tumbler to roll it down.  We used an 11″x7″ pan because an 8″x8″ pan looked a tad small.  Refrigerate for a couple of hours.  These are seriously good.  I wish we had some other more colorful things about to toss into the mix.  Dried cherries and blueberries?  Mini M&Ms?