Crunchy Good-for-You Granola Bars

I’ve been on a bit of a granola kick lately. A little while back I made those chewy, 100% customizable granola bars that are totally fun for mixing and matching ingredients. Then, I shared with you my all-time favorite granola recipe. I am hopelessly addicted to that stuff. I made a batch of it for our road trip to Florida, where we had no trouble polishing it off. Then I made another batch before we left to come home so we had a stash for the trip back. (I think there are still granola remnants in the car.) Once back home, I started thinking about merging the two – the awesome crunchiness of the granola with the portability (and cohesiveness) of a bar. I began searching for a crunchy granola bar and after sifting through countless recipes these really jumped out at me. It was different, had a combination of grains, seeds and dried fruit, and sounded delicious. My intuition was right. These are phenomenal. I’ll definitely be keeping a steady supply of these on hand for healthy snacking.

Since you may not be familiar with all of the ingredients needed to make these bars (I wasn’t) I thought I would go through the uncommon ones and let you know where I found them so hopefully you don’t have to do too much wild goose-chasing.

Puffed Kamut – I found this in the organic/health foods section of the grocery store near where the Kashi cereals and other organic puffed rice and wheat were displayed.

Salted sunflower seeds – I picked these up in the produce section of the grocery store on the shelves where the bulk nuts are found. They had regular and unsalted, but the recipe specifically called for the salted version, so I got those.Raw pumpkin seeds – I also found these in the organic/health foods section of the grocery store.Brown rice syrup – This was also in the organic/health foods section. It has the sticky consistency of honey, and after doing some Googling I came up with a 50/50 on whether it needs refrigerated after opening, so I went the safe route and stored it in the fridge