This is not a food blog...

...but I'm going to post a recipe. I never really do that but I had about a dozen people ask me for the recipe for these granola bars after I posted a picture on Instagram. Which, by the way, is where I consistently keep up with our everyday lives. I neglect the blog like whoa, but I'm a regular on Instagram.

Anyway.

I love to cook and I love to bake. And I especially love to find ways to make things healthier. Not just cutting out the bad stuff, but adding things with more nutritional value. I never really post recipes mainly because I'm not very good at measuring things when I make stuff. Even cookies, sometimes I just throw things in until it looks like it will bake right. So I'll try to make this as precise as possible, but just know that there's room to add more or less of the things you like.

I've written before about how obsessed I am with coconut oil for about a million reasons. I can't go on enough about all the nutritional benefits of coconut oil. And I've recently been really into using raw honey in baking. And I like to add flax meal to just about everything. So there's some of each in this recipe of course.

I adapted this from a few recipes that I read and took my favorite things from each. So here it is! The recipe for yummy chocolate coconut walnut granola bars.

INGREDIENTS

4 1/2 cups oatmeal
1 1/4 cups honey (I used raw. You could also do part honey, part agave. Agave is suuuuper sweet so don't replace too much of the honey with it.)
3/4 cup coconut oil (you can find high quality organic, cold pressed at Costco for very cheap)
4 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 1/2 cups chopped walnuts
1 1/2 cups shredded coconut (I used unsweetened)
1/2 cup ground flax seed
1 1/4 cup chopped dark chocolate (I love Ghirardelli 60% cacao. It's very dark, and has no dairy in it. You could use any kind that you want though. Even butterscotch would be really good in these I think. More like a 7 layer bar kind of thing. Mmm.)

DIRECTIONS

Preheat your oven to 325 degrees.

Line a large baking sheet with rimmed sides with parchment paper.

Put the oats on the baking sheet and let them toast in the oven for about 10 minutes, stirring a few times throughout. Remove them to a large bowl when done.

While your oats are toastin', put your honey and coconut oil in a small saucepan and melt together over medium heat. Coconut oil can tolerate high heat, but be careful not to burn it. Remove from the heat and stir in the vanilla and salt.

Pour mixture over the oats and stir thoroughly to coat. Stir in the walnuts and coconut. Stir in your chocolate.
It will melt down and become like chocolate coating instead of chocolate chunks. If you want it to stay in chunks you could try letting the oat mixture cool for a while before you add them in. Maybe I'll try that next time.

Pour the mix onto your parchment lined baking sheet, using a spatula to spread it as much as you can. Then you can wet your hands and press the mixture firmly out to the edges, or use another piece of parchment paper on top to keep it from sticking to your hands. I wanted mine to be a little thinner, so I used a very large sheet and pushed them all the way to the edge.

Bake for 8-10 minutes. Don't let them burn! My oven cooks really fast, so I only baked them 8 minutes. Adjust for your oven. They are crumbly when they first come out, but they set up as they cool.

Cool the baking sheet on a cooling rack for about 15 minutes, and then transfer the parchment sheet to the cooling rack.
Let cool for about another hour and then cut them in to bars, whatever size you like.
Mine were about 1"x4". I did them smaller so toddler man Mason could eat them. And he DEVOURS these. My batch made about 50 bars that size.

They are delicious right out of the refrigerator, and I froze half of them. I'm not sure how long they'll last in the freezer because we ate them all within a few weeks. But I'm guessing they'd stay good for a month or two.

Enjoy these admittedly NOT low fat, but still nutritionally amazing nonetheless, chewy granola bars.