Five-Star Granola Bars 1990s

Healthy and Truly Delicious!

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Who doesn’t like some good granola bars? I do! I always look for those easy and inexpensive snack recipes for my family. If a snack is wholesome, it’s an extra bonus. My old cookbooks are loaded with great ideas for snacks of all kinds. At the risk of gaining extra pounds, I am always tempted to try as many good recipes from the years gone by as possible. I suspect that my whole lifetime would not be enough to try them hundreds and hundreds of recipes in my old cookbooks! What do I see when I look at the old recipes? Wisdom and many hours of hard labor behind those familiar words, “Take two cups sugar, add one cup milk…”

It all starts with THE PANTRY, y’all! 

Last night I inspected the pantry in search for that special “something”. Those random items begged to be transformed into some sort of deliciousness. My husband built me some extra shelves in the pantry, and like a hoarder, I keep on filling them up with “the stuff”. I sure do hope to use all of those cans, packs, and bags of goodness one day.

Do you like those glossy luscious food pictures from the 1990s cookbooks? 

I sat down with a bunch of newly found and purchased cookbooks. I can spend hours going through pages! Finally, one of them, the 1990 Southern Living edition of “Five-Star Recipe Collection” with its tabbed index inserts, caught my attention. The book is a lot of fun, indeed! (You have probably seen those well-staged rich pictures in those cookbooks.. They look so “early 90s”! Love ’em!) There was a recipe for Homemade Crunchy Granola that I decided to adapt in accordance with whatever ingredients I had available in the deep of my pantry.

It’s not the horse that draws the cart, but the oats! ~ Proverb

Seriously, you can add so many ingredients to this mixture! Chopped dried fruits, nuts, chocolate morsels, any kind of seeds.. You and your taste buds are to decide what YOUR granola is going to taste like! That is the beauty of this recipe! You have a full freedom to modify it in any way you like to and still get an awesome result!

My granola bars are very, VERY GOOD. We like them a lot! I will definitely make some more as soon as this batch is gone (tomorrow?) The original recipe claims that one can make 30 bars out of this oat mixture. I yielded 20 generously-sized square bars. My gluten-sensitive folks’ verdict was, “DELISH!”

Note: If you need a simple tutti-frutti dessert in your life but you have no more than five minutes to put it together, try Cherry Pudding that can be prepared as a delicious gluten-free version of itself! It’s so worth it!