easy breakfast bars

I love this! It’s a healthy dessert full of fiber and dark chocolate. It’s made with no white flour, no butter, and it’s a super easy one-bowl recipe. And if you line your pan with foil, there’s almost no cleanup. You can use walnuts but I find that pecans, especially when they are toasted first, have so much more flavor so they are my nuts of choice for most baking. In fact, I toast one bag at a time and keep them refrigerated for all my baking.

Now about the chocolate: Using a 70% dark chocolate bar is the healthiest choice and I like to use the 72% bar from World Market but you do have to chop it up so chocolate chips are definitely easier. I recently discovered Ghirardelli 60% dark chocolate chips and they are great but bigger than most so I did not like the result when I added them whole. So I chopped them into smaller pieces and an added benefit was there was more chocolate in every bite.

These are the chocolate chips I used, but I chopped them up first:

And here is what the World Market bar looks like:

My favorite thing, besides the delicious, chewy taste of this healthy dessert bar, is how incredibly easy it is. One bowl, no mixer, just mix it all up and bake.  These healthy oatmeal chocolate chip bars are not just dessert – I must confess I also have them with breakfast. For a healthy dessert or a chewy oatmeal breakfast bar,  just click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

What’s wrong with a few chocolate chips for breakfast? It’s okay with me if you’re getting whole grains, oats, banana and walnuts in a delicious breakfast brownie. This new recipe replaces my old breakfast brownie because this one uses ingredients that are more available to everyone.

There are lots of reasons to eat bananas. They’re a good source of vitamins C & B6, manganese, potassium, fiber, biotin, and copper. And the riper the banana, the sweeter it is and the easier it’ll be to mix into the batter. Walnuts provide heart-healthy fats and protein but for the best flavor they really should be toasted first. I toast a bunch at a time and keep them available, refrigerated, for baking. To toast nuts spread on an ungreased baking sheet and bake for 8-10 minutes at 350 degrees F.

Oats are breakfast superstars – high in soluble fiber, which is known for lowering cholesterol and keeping things moving. I use regular Quaker rolled oats in this recipe and extra light olive oil but you can use another oil of your choice like canola. So this is my new Breakfast Brownie and I hope you like it. I’m not saying it should BE breakfast, but I am saying why not dessert AFTER breakfast? Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones