If you can make rice krispies treats, you can make granola bars. They’re that easy. I’d been stocking my desk at work with Kashi granola bars but I wanted to try making my own. Again my measurements are imprecise but it’s the ingredients that count. For this recipe, even the ingredients list doesn’t count for much because you can add almost anything you like. Almost… I kinda’ messed these up because I substituted a very important ingredient. Still, it’s tasty and I’ll just have to try again!

• 3 cups of oats
• 1/2 cup of flax seeds
• 1 cup dried fruit (raisins, cranberries, mango, chopped dates)
• 1 cup nuts or seeds (pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, crushed peanuts, almonds)
• 1/2 cup honey, molasses (your preference)
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon (nutmeg, pumpkin spice mix)
• 3 tablespoons (unsalted) butter
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

You want a decent mixture of nuts and dried fruits for added variety.  Also you can control the sweetness depending on your preference.  However, you do need to have enough sticky liquids to hold the bars together.

In a large shallow pan, toast oats and any raw nuts in a 300 degree F oven for 15 minutes.  Stir every 5 minutes to keep it from burning.  Be careful not to burn the nuts.  Some of the nuts I got came pre toasted or roasted.  I left those out of this cooking process.*  Once they’re done, toss together the toasted oats, nuts, and dried fruit in a buttered a mixing bowl.

Melt the sugar, butter, vanilla, salt, spices and honey in a saucepan and pour the syrupy mix over the dry ingredients.

Stir well to combine, then lay out the mixture on a flat pan.  I would’ve preferred the flat glass pans but one’s in the freezer holding a lasagna and the other was in the dishwasher.

Take a rolling pin, or two buck chuck and compress the granola.  You want them to hold together.

Once cooled, cut them into bars.  You can individually wrap them or store them in a sealed container.

*Option: Mix everything together then bake the bars after.

Oops!  Generally, substituting ingredients is fine.  But with granola bars, it’s necessary to have something very sticky that can bind the ingredients together.  In this case, honey or molasses.  I didn’t have either so I used maple syrup.  Needless to say, maple syrup can’t bind worth shit.  So I got a lot of crumbly granola bars and essentially, it works out better as cereal.  Now I know, so you know too!

Ingredients:

• Lasagna pasta
• Ground turkey (2 .5 lbs)
• Ricotta cheese (the big tub)
• Eggs (2-3)
• Mozzarella cheese
• Flat-leafed parsley (1 bunch)
• Onions (3)
• Tomatoes (3)
• Spinach (1 box of frozen)
• Garlic (10 cloves or a whole head)
• Oregano and basil
• Cooking oil
• Spices: salt, pepper, chili powder, cumin, cinnamon

Start by boiling salted water to cook the pasta. While that’s going on, wash and chop everything up.

Next, I took care of the ricotta. Beat 3 eggs first, add the chopped oregano and dried basil (or fresh, if you are too good for the dried stuff), then stir in the ricotta. You can do this step after cooking up the meat too if you want.

Then you cook the turkey with the following seasonings: chili powder, dried basil, cumin, oregano, salt and pepper, and cinnamon. If you’re anything like me and can’t measure worth a bag of beans, this is where you might run into the issue of pan-not-big-enough.

So I could only cook the garlic with the meat, while the onions, spinach, tomatoes, and parsley had to go in a separate pan.

Then you stir them together with the tomato sauce.

Layer as you please.  I don’t know if there’s a correct pattern.  Sometimes I start with pasta, sometimes with meat.  Sometimes I end with pasta, ricotta, mozzarella, sometimes I end with meat and mozzarella. Bake until the cheese browns a little at 350 degrees F.

This recipe is very similar to my last one. I changed a few things however.

1. 3 eggs to the ricotta rather than two to make it a bit richer, as well as freshly chopped oregano and basil. It smelled so good!
2. I remembered to add the flat-leafed parsley this time. It disappears when you stir it into the meat so it’s good to get a big bunch.
3. Cumin and chili powder to the ground turkey rather than using a roll of pre-packaged pork sausage. Although one of the packages of ground turkey was pre-seasoned with Italian seasonings, whatever that means.
4. A box of frozen spinach to the meat-tomato sauce.
5. I couldn’t find whole wheat pasta that didn’t need pre-cooking so I had to use regular whole wheat pasta.
6. Jarred spaghetti sauce and 3 fresh tomatoes. I think I read somewhere that canned tomatoes contain bpa because they’re lined with plastic. I didn’t verify this. Did you know cooking tomatoes can cut down smells in your house kinda’ the same way skunked people bathe in tomato juice? If you add garlic and onions though, I dunno. Again, not verified.
7. Three onions instead of one.
8. I forgot the order of layering and jacked it all up. For the first, I did meat, pasta, ricotta, mozarella twice. For the second, I did pasta, then 2x – meat, pasta, ricotta, mozarella. Basically, I’m a sloppy imprecise cook. I don’t measure anything so really all you need is the ingredients list to follow this recipe. Especially if you don’t want to wind up with two large lasagnas. Though after you taste it, you maybe want two after all. I add in so many fresh ingredients it comes out delicious!

By the way, I don’t plan on eating 2 humongous lasagnas one right after the other. After it cools, you can plastic wrap it, foil it, then freeze it for at least three months. I did that with the last one and it was still as good as ever. If you’re going on vacation or know you will be busy in the foreseeable future, this is a great way to pre-plan. That way, when you come back from vacation you don’t have to worry about grocery shopping and cooking for a while.