Banana Oatmeal Breakfast Bars

The weekend in NY was great, with the exception of driving back last night after the wedding and not getting home until 2:30 am this morning.

I worked from home today, which worked out perfectly because I had a ton of work to do but didn’t want to leave my bed to do it. 

I wrapped up work around 4 (I had worked a lot this weekend while we were traveling, so I felt like I earned an early afternoon) and went to the kitchen.  After spotting some very brown bananas in our fruit basket, a breakfast bar recipe was born.

Banana Oatmeal Breakfast Bars

Ingredients:

• 2 cups old-fashioned oats
• 1/2 cup of flour
• 1/4 chia seeds
• 1/2 cup vanilla protein powder
• 1/2 cup dried fruit (I used dried blueberries from Trader Joe’s)
• 2 large, very ripe bananas
• 2 egg white
• 1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
• 1/2 cup agave nectar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350*.  Spray a 9×13 glass baking dish with cooking spray, and line with parchment paper.
2. Mix together dry ingredients in a large bowl (oats through dried fruit).  Mix together wet ingredients in a small bowl (bananas through vanilla extract).  Add the wet ingredients to the dry.  Mix well.
3. Pour over parchment paper.  Spread to cover the entire bottom of the pan.
4. Cook for about 30 minutes, or until the edges begin to brown. 
5. Once cool, remove from baking pan and cut with a pizza cutter on cutting board into even pieces. 

The nutritional information obviously varies by how big you cut the squares, but for 20 servings it looks like this:

Calories – 121     Fat – 1.4g      Carbs – 23.5g      Fiber – 2.2g       Protein – 5.5g

Now I’m back to the kitchen to finish cooking some lentil soup for dinner.  Soup in summer, you ask?  I’m forced to eat this during the summer because they keep my office temperatures FREEZING.