I’ve learned by now that there’s really no way around my post-lunch chocolate cravings. I’ve tried ignoring them, or substituting something healthier, and sometimes that works for a few days, but it inevitably ends in a huge chocolatey binge at some point.  I’m just a person who needs chocolate, and that’s that. But since I’m determined to rein in the travel-driven overeating of the last few months, I’m currently searching for less-bad-for-you, more-portion-controlled chocolate treats.

For the past few months my chocolate fix has been to go down to the lobby shop and fill a bag with chocolate covered almonds, chocolate covered raisins, and white chocolate pretzels. This is a bad, bad habit, because even if I tell myself a lot of times that the bag of chocolate-covered goodies will last me all week, I always eat it in one sitting, staring at my computer screen, during that 3pm work slump. (Is that a universal thing? It seems to be at my office). And then I usually feel sick, because I usually overfill the bag.

So taking inspiration from this habit, I came up with a recipe that hits the same notes but is a bit less indulgent: Chocolate Almond Granola Bites. Using oats, rice cereal, a mix of Blue Diamond Dark Chocolate and Sea Salt Almonds, almond butter, honey, and of course, chocolate, I whipped up a batch of these bars, and then cut them into very manageable pieces. They are still chocolatey and satisfying but the almonds, almond butter, and oats give them more staying power and nutritional value. I also used unsweetened chocolate, which made me feel extra virtuous. I’m not saying that eating one of these is the same as eating a bag of chocolate covered pretzels… but it does the trick!

This post is sponsored by Blue Diamond Almonds. All opinions are honest and my own.

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Chocolate Almond Granola Bites

Makes 16 bars.

• 1/4 c. almond butter
• 1/2 c. honey
• 3 oz. unsweetened chocolate
• 1 1/2 c. rolled oats
• 1 1/2 c. puffed rice cereal
• 1/2 c. Blue Diamond Sea Salt Almonds
• 1/2 c. Blue Diamond Dark Chocolate Almonds
• 16 white-chocolate covered pretzels

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line an 8×8 inch baking pan with parchment paper and set aside.
2. In a small saucepan, combine the almond butter, honey, and chocolate. Stirring, melt the liquids over low heat until the mixture is smooth and even in color. Remove from the heat
3. Add the oats, rice cereal, and almonds to a large bowl and stir to combine. Pour the chocolate-honey mixture over the cereal and stir to thoroughly coat the cereal with the chocolate. Let cool to room temperature, then press the mixture firmly into the prepared pan. Press the white-chocolate covered pretzels on top of the mixture, spacing them evenly.
4. Bake the granola bites for 15 minutes, then remove from the oven. Let cool completely before slicing and serving.

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I’d been moping a little bit about Valentine’s Day this year. Even though it’s not a huge holiday in my book, the fact that Trevor would be away (and far away, at that – he’s in Oman!) for business seemed unfair. But then scrolling through my feedly last week I came across this post by Melissa and remembered that I loved celebrating Valentine’s Day long before boys were in the picture. Like she says, it’s about “spreading a little extra love and joy to friends and family,” and when I think back, my best memories of this holiday are mostly of my girlfriends and family. I’m lucky enough to get to spend almost every day with my man, loving him, and even though the flowers and chocolates on the 14th are nice, they really aren’t the point. So I’m postponing the romantic part of February until Trevor is back, and today, I’m celebrating friends and family. [Edit: Because he’s the sweetest, Trevor still managed to get roses to my desk at work today even though he’s thousands of miles away. I love you, Trev.]

First up, family – as far back as I can remember, Valentine’s Day meant coming downstairs to a big heart shaped box of chocolates and a card from my mom telling us how much she loved us. I mostly remember these mornings as sort-of bleary-eyed surprises, probably because I had to get up for school at 6am most days and it’s pretty dark at 6am in February. She also always helped us make little homemade valentines to bring to school – bags of foil-wrapped hearts tied up in pink and red tuille with doile-and-construction-paper cards attached. Our valentines were way better than the average school valentine. So tonight I’m having dinner with my parents and my baby brother (who is probably dreading today, seeing as fifteen is probably the most awkward age for Valentine’s Day). We’re heaving steak and red wine and heart-shaped shortbread cookies and I’m really excited about it.

As for friends, I’m sending my three best college girlfriends these little care packages because celebrating your girlfriends is important. In high school, we used to have Valentine’s Day parties at my house where we would all wear pink and make each other goofy homemade cards and decorate sugar cookies while getting a little hyper from too much hot chocolate and giggling. It was great. Later, during our freshman year at Duke, Becky and I got all the pink things we could find at the Dollar General and then covered her dorm room floor with candy hearts while making valentine’s for our new found boy friends. Because part of celebrating your girlfriends is talking about how much you both love boys.

I was going to make cookies for these packages but after thinking about it, decided that maybe some crunchy dessert masquerading as a healthy snack would be more appropriate for my friends, who are all super busy and on-the-go students/teachers. This chocolate-almond-strawberry granola is inspired by (OK, I’m blatantly ripping it off) the only commercial brand of granola I’ve ever liked, LoveCrunch. I think I might like my version a smidge better, but I’m not sure I’m saving any money by making it myself – freeze-dried fruit is surprisingly expensive. The base is simply oats and almonds, which are coated with a mixture of melted coconut oil, cocoa powder, and honey before it’s baked. After it’s baked but while it’s still warm, you stir in the chocolate chips, resulting in heavenly clumps of granola held together by creamy bits of melted chocolate, which is seriously going to elevate your yogurt-eating experience. I made the mistake of bringing the care packages to work with me before I shipped them, and I was eating out of everyone’s bags – sorry if they seem a little light, guys, I promise I’ll make you some more when you come visit. But seriously, this stuff is kind of addictive. Be careful with it. Or just give it away to someone that you love.

Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone!

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Chocolate-Almond-Strawberry Granola

Inspired by LoveCrunch and adapted loosely from Yummy Mummy. Makes about 8 cups.

• 6 cups rolled oats
• 2 c. chopped almonds
• 3/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 c. coconut oil
• 3/4 c. mild-tasting honey
• 3/4 c. cocoa powder
• 1 1/2 c. chocolate chips (or more or less depending on how dessert-like you want it…)
• 1 c. freeze dried strawberries

1. Preheat the oven to 325°F. In a large bowl, stir together the oats, almonds, and salt until evenly mixed. Set aside.
2. Add the coconut oil and the honey to a small saucepan and heat over medium-low heat, stirring, until the coconut oil has melted and the consistency of the mixture is smooth. Remove from the heat and stir in the cocoa powder, whisking until all clumps are removed. Pour the chocolate mixture over the oats and stir to evenly coat the oats with the cocoa-mixture. Spread out on two large sheet pans and bake in the oven for 15 minutes. Remove from the oven, stir up the granola to prevent burning, then bake for another 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool for 5-10 minutes, until warm but touchable. Return to the mixing bowl and add 1 cup of the chocolate chips to the warm granola, stirring to evenly combine.
3. Let granola cool completely, then stir in the remaining 1/2 c. of chocolate chips and the strawberries. Keep in an airtight container.

The post Happy Valentine’s Day // Chocolate-Almond-Strawberry Granola appeared first on Katie at the Kitchen Door.

Snacks are a wonderful, very necessary, slightly indulgent part of everyday life.  They are the food-world version of naps – and everyone knows how much naps rock.  Couch naps.  Sunday morning naps.  Post-thanksgiving dinner naps.  Naps by the fire.  Naked naps.  Naps in the sunny reading nook on summer afternoons.  And then there’s the snacks: Cookies.  Pretzels.  Graham crackers with brown sugar and butter (a Morris household specialty).  Bananas with peanut butter.  Hummus.  Chips and salsa.  Peach-mango smoothies.  You get the picture.

Both naps and snacks come in an incredible variety of types, each with its own benefits, shortcomings, and times at which it is appropriate to partake in them.  For example, you wouldn’t take a couch nap on a Sunday morning, and you wouldn’t reach for the hummus when that daily afternoon very intense chocolate craving kicks in (does that happen to other people??).  Similarly, you wouldn’t eat cookies before a big exam, you would eat something fibrous and brain-empowering, like granola bars.  Which brings us to today’s recipe for granola bars that possess a much stronger nutritional profile than your average, over-priced, but very convenient store bought granola bar.

Homemade granola bars have been on my “to make” list for a very long time, but I haven’t gotten around to it because I had kind of assumed they would be sort of time consuming.  False.  These literally took seven minutes to mix together.  Seven.  There are very few days when I don’t have seven minutes to bake.  Plus, they were much much better than I was expecting them to be.  For an egg-less, butter-less, oil-less, sugar-less baked good packed with flax and oats (and OK, a fair number of butterscotch chips too), they were so good.  Even though I sent the majority of them to this lucky guy I know who is very poor and happened to tell me that some days he doesn’t eat until 3 because he doesn’t get a break for lunch and never has anything to pack because the only things in their fridge are sausage, mushrooms, and Sweet Baby Ray’s … I probably consumed about 1/4 of the batch just by picking at the odds and ends during the photo shoot.  And then pondered why I wasn’t hungry after not eating breakfast.  Granola bars are breakfast, Katie.  Despite popular belief, eating three halves of something does not mean you didn’t eat any of it; it means you had one and a half of them.  This is probably shocking news to Steph, the queen of “I’ll just have half.”  Anyway.  They’re really good, really easy, and really pretty healthy too.  Plus you can pretty much put whatever you want in them in terms of mix-ins.  A great find.  One warning: if you’re expecting the crunchy snap of a Nature granola bar, these might disappoint – they are decidedly chewy.  It seems as though most of the recipes I’ve found use the same base recipe, but if I find a recipe for a truly crunchy bar, I will definitely share.  In the meantime, enjoy these as an appropriate pre-exam snack.  Or maybe even a pre-nap snack.  Live large.

P.S.  Thank you to everyone for your support in the Ridiculously Delicious Challenge!  I will be moving on to round 3 – more soon.

Butterscotch, Peanut Butter, and Pretzel Granola Bars

Adapted from Cherries and Chocolate.  Makes 12 granola bars.

• 1/2 c. unsweetened applesauce
• 2 TBS agave nectar
• 1/3 c. creamy peanut butter
• 1 1/3 c. old fashioned oats
• 2/3 c. high fiber, small, crunchy cereal (bran buds, flax bites, puffed rice, etc.)
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 2/3 c. butterscotch chips
• 1/4 c. broken pretzel pieces

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.  Line an 8×8 inch pan with parchment paper.
2. Combine applesauce, peanut butter, and agave nectar, mixing until evenly textured.  Fold in oats, cereal, salt, chips, and pretzel pieces.  Spoon batter into pan and smooth into an even layer with back of spoon.
3. Bake until golden brown, 25-30 minutes.  Allow to cool in pan for 5 mintues.  Then remove from pan by lifting edges of parchment paper.  Allow to cool completely (mine were best after letting them set overnight) before cutting, or they will fall apart.

The post Snacks and naps. appeared first on Katie at the Kitchen Door.

I have a confession to make.  I made and photographed this granola on April 8th.  Yes, that was two full weeks ago.  Yes, there is still some granola in my cupboard (and  yes I plan on eating it because I am a college student and college students don’t believe in food going bad).  I even had this whole post planned about my mom, and how she makes this incredible granola that my dad thinks she should sell, and how she just came to visit me and we had a fabulous time hiking in Western North Carolina… but then what happened was I got too busy actually doing the hiking in Western North Carolina (and the sitting in our private hot tub afterward).  And then I got home and had five major engineering assignments to complete in as many days.  And then suddenly Trevor was here and we were celebrating my 21st birthday with a pitcher of sangria in the Duke Gardens and although we did make some delicious things – french toast with cinnamon syrup, farfalle salad with pesto and kalamata olives, lemon squares, and, uh, duh, sangria – I was not about to spend that precious three days attempting to get the lighting on those lemon squares perfect.  And then finally I sat down last night to write about the stupid granola and I was suddenly overwhelmingly excited about falafel.  Life.  It happens.

But now you know all of the things I was going to say!  To recap: mom is awesome, hiking is awesome, birthdays are awesome, Trevor is awesome, granola is awesome.  Everything else you need to know is in the recipe below.  Oh, and even if you don’t make this granola, make your own granola.  It’s about 8 billion times better than anything you can get at the store.  Even than what you can get in the grain bins at Wholefoods.  Promise.

Granola

• 2 c. oats
• 1/2 c. sweetened, flaked coconut
• 1 c. nuts (chopped if desired)
• short 1/2 c. canola oil
• full 1/2 c. honey
• 1 c. dried fruit

1. Preheat the oven to 300°F
2. Mix together oats, coconut, and nuts in a large bowl.  Measure oil and stir in.  Measure honey in same cup (makes the honey slide out more easily) and stir in until evenly coated.  The more honey you use, the bigger your granola clumps will be.  You should use slightly more honey than oil.
3. Spread granola evenly on a baking sheet with sides.  Bake for 12 minutes, remove from oven, and stir to keep from burning.  Return to oven and continue baking for 12 minutes.
4. Remove from oven, and put back in bowl.  Stir in dried fruit and let cool.  Store in ziploc baggies.

*I almost always use dried cherries as my fruit and walnuts and pecans as my nuts, but you can use anything.  I’m really of the opinion that the cherries are essential though.

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