Recipe Request - Granola Bars

I'm looking for a relatively healthy granola bar recipe. That means that it doesn't contain tons of butter and sweeteners. It should contain rolled oats and probably some sort of nuts and maybe peanut butter. Ideally, it would be sweetened with maple syrup. I'd also like it not to have coconut. I don't care for raisins, but those I can easily leave out (or substitute acceptable ingredients for). I'm not sure why, but I don't think it should contain eggs. I don't care whether the resulting bars are chewy or crunchy.

I did some googling but haven't found anything that meets those criteria. Mostly, I'm looking for a cheaper alternative to boughten stuff to keep in the office for a mid-afternoon snack. Anything that costs under $5 for a week's supply qualifies.

News and Views

Tonight is catchup time and catching up on writing here is one way I am procrastinating on other things.

First, I really liked this item from The Onion. The following paragraph is truly brilliant:


According to NASA officials, the epic postponement will occur in three progressively longer stages. The first, predicted to last anywhere from three to five years and cost an estimated $13.8 billion, is tentatively scheduled to begin in late 2012. The second stage—which will ultimately be broken up into 14 smaller stages—will comprise a series of advanced timetable adjustments that, if successful, could delay human beings from exploring the outmost reaches of the known galaxy for decades to come.

The third stage is largely theoretical at this point.


Moving on to more serious matters, I have to wonder about the Washington Post's headline writers. I got snookered into reading an article about "Suspicious Package Rocks Embassy" only to find out that a band named Suspicious Package had performed at the Embassy of Italy.

I think they did a better job with a piece about Susan Boyle, which they titled, "The Scot Heard Round the World." Unfortunately, they also let fashion reporter Robin Gihvan write about Ms. Boyle. Gihvan wrote, essentially, that Boyle should feel obliged to have a makeover because that's part of the Cinderella mythos and then, in her on-line chat, ignored that she had used the word "should" about 50 times in her essay when people called her on her bigotry. (Fashion reporters are, of course, clueless in general. Another example was a spread in the Sunday paper which reminded me that they have no idea of what is appropriate for adults to wear to work. And the fashion chat responded to a question about where to find affordable plus size garments with a mention of a store that sells sizes 0-18. Yeah, it's possible that the person asking the question could wear a 16 or 18, but that's a big assumption.)

My final news note has to do with the death of Venezuelan polo horses in Florida, possibly by poisoning. I have to admit my immediate reaction was to wonder how Dick Francis would use that in one of his mysteries.

More Catch-Up

South African English: I have probably mentioned my fascination with variant English vocabularies here before and none is quite so fascinating as South African English. My favorite term is "robot" (meaning a traffic light) since I was so completely baffled by a set of directions in Pretoria which told me to turn at the robot. Most other oddities are Afrikaans words that have crept into English, e.g. "braai" (meaning "barbecue" and a word you can't go more than about 48 hours in South Africa without hearing).

I'm in the middle of reading one of Arthur Goldstuck's books on South African urban legends and ran across two terms which were new to me. The first was "smalls," apparently to refer to classified ads. The other reference was to a commercial being "flighted" on television. Obviously, that means "aired," but it strikes me as a strange usage and possibly a translation back from Afrikaans.

Printing Error of the Week: Ryan Zimmerman (and, possibly other Nationals players) were seen at a game a few days ago wearing jerseys that read "Natinals" on the front. The company that makes the jerseys apologized. I suppose it wouldn't occur to a baseball player to proofread his uniform.

Movies: I saw Duplicity over the weekend. I liked it, though I thought a few plot points were improbable at best. I was particularly pleased with a love scene in which one gets to see that Clive Owens has chest hair. Yes, I am shallow.

Another Baseball Item: Every Major League Baseball team but one is selling single game tickets for their entire season by now. That one is the New York Mets. I'd really like to go up and see their new ballpark this summer, so I wish they would at least tell me when tickets will be on sale.

Airfare: As I may have mentioned, I bought a ticket to Lima for under $250 for later this year. Today, I bought a ticket for a quick excursion to Fort Lauderdale in June. That cost just about $200. Don't even try to figure out the logic. (And, no, it would not have been cheaper to fly into Miami. In fact, the fares to Miami were all around $350.)