Granola Bar

 

Granola is breakfast / snack made with oats, nuts and honey. For my family Granola is not just enough for breakfast. I prefer to have little heavier breakfast. So I make it for snacks. I make them as bars unlike the cereals, so it is easy to carry and eat in snacks box.

It is very handy and healthy guilt free snack to munch on. How much ever I make, it will get over in couple of days. The culprits are my husband and daughter. 

I referred the recipe from sharmi. This time for a change, I use Jaggery instead of Honey. It was little different in taste, but we liked it.

Ingredients:

·         Oats -  1 cup (Quick cooking oats)

·         Butter – 1 tbsp

·         Jaggery – ½ cup (Or little less)

·         Water – 2 tbsp (For the jaggery to dissolve)

·         Vanilla Essence – 1 tsp

·         Corn flakes – ¼ cup (crushed with hands)

·         Dry fruits – ¼ cup (Roughly chopped - Dates / dried figs / raisins any choice of yours)

·         Nuts – ¼ cup (Roughly chopped - Almonds / walnuts any choice of yours)

Method:

Line the butter paper in tray. This will help us to easily to handle the bars. I used my Tupperware lunch box for this.

Dry roast Oats, jaggery, dry fruits and nuts in a pan in medium flame. Just for couple of minutes will do. Keep it aside.

In the same pan, add butter. Let it melt.

Add jaggery and water.

When the jaggery melts completely and starts to boil, add the dry roasted oats and nuts mixture.

Add vanilla essence and mix them well. Vanilla is for flavoring, you can also skip it. Switch off the stove. If the mixture is very loose, add some more oats.

Transfer the mixture to the tray lined with butter paper.

Let it cool for a while; cut them into bars with sharp knife.

While removing the pieces, lift the butter paper out of the tray and pull out the pieces.

If you find the butter paper, tray, cutting, pulling process a headache, just make them into small bite sized balls.

Store it in refrigerator in an airtight container.