One Ingredient Challenge: Granola Bars

Part of an ongoing series of cooking from scratch. That is, we cook something from basic items that don't have multiple ingredients (e.g. store-bought spaghetti sauce includes all sorts of spices and maybe other stuff too; we'd start with tomatoes and individual spices and add them together to make our own sauce). See other challenges here.

L and Mommy whipped up some granola bars from scratch for the One Ingredient Challenge back in the summer--summer of 2013 that is. This is another old post in celebration of Thanksgiving. We are celebrating by giving the readers some leftovers from our European adventures. Anyway, on to the granola bars!

L the mix master

We followed a simple recipe that included oats, raisins, almonds, honey, butter, etc. The nut ingredient was optional in two senses. First, the cook can include nuts or not. Second, if including nuts, they could be almonds or cashews or pecans or any other tasty option. We went with almonds.

Sadly, we did not keep a copy of the recipe, so I don't know the proper amounts of each ingredient. They were fun to mix and spread into our cake pans. Then they went into the oven for a good long while (again, no recipe.)

Into the oven!

Readers may be wondering why we don't have the recipe. The truth is that the bars did not turn out well. We burned one pan and the other wasn't very tasty. And clean up of the pans was a lot of work too (a factor many recipes fail to take into account, along with ingredient prep times, but that's another complaint I'll make on another day).

We hope your Thanksgiving is much more satisfying (and easy to clean up) than these granola bars!