Those Granola Bars

I make mostly homemade lunches for my kids...aside from the granola bars.  A while back, I tried making homemade granola bars and our twins really didn't dig them, no matter what.  (The professor and I can vouch that the homemade ones were delicious, we ate two whole pans of them and probably gained a lot of weight during that experiment!)

As a result, I just buy a big box of granola bars with chocolate chips but no nuts from the grocery store and I carry them around as extra snacks, especially for doctors' appointments or during vacation periods.  It's safe to say I've thought WAY too much about these granola bars.

Two things happened.  Today, my opinion piece about the granola bars ran on the CBC-Manitoba website:
Mom's emergency granola bar is there when you need it-no matter who you are

Second thing...
My kids' school is having a program this week called "The litterless lunch."  They want to reduce lunch time waste and trash by asking kids to bring homemade foods, packaged in reusable containers, so that everything in the lunch can be reused, recycled or composted.

Turns out that my twins were already in second place in the classroom when it came to bringing lunches with no trash.  What made them second place?  The granola bar wrappers!

Today, one of my guys decided to help me make homemade granola bars again.  We mostly made the recipe up, but each bar has oats, sunflower seeds, cut up pieces of dry fruit, chocolate chips, a little whole wheat flour...all mushed together with condensed milk.  We baked it for a half hour, and then cooled it down fast using a Winnipeg solution: by leaving it outside in the snow on the back deck for a few minutes.  The quick cool down in snow isn't the recipe, of course!

We produced enough bars for school lunches this week, plus enough to taste test.  Turns out that now, both twins think these are darn good.  Have their tastes changed?  Are they proud of their mom's litterless lunches?  Who knows.

Now we have more granola bars (in wrappers) to give away this week, too.  It's all good.

--This photo's from the article, link above.  I'm not that hip looking!

PS: When the kids first mentioned the litterless lunch, I couldn't figure it out.  I thought they were talking about 'the literal lunch.'  And I was like, what kind of crazy elementary school program is this?  Who packs a figurative or metaphoric lunch!?  (Joke's on me, of course. Maybe I took too many literature courses at Cornell.)