Meet my favorite granola bar recipe. These granola bars are delicious and easy to make with basic pantry ingredients. You don’t even have to bake them!

These granola bars can pass as a quick breakfast, and they make a perfect snack. I love to pack these bars for road trips and flights, and I love hearing from moms who make these granola bars regularly for their kids. They’re a big hit with all ages.

As you’ll see, the recipe is versatile, so you can easily incorporate your favorite flavors, like nuts, chocolate and dried fruit. You’ll find my go-to flavorings in the recipe below if you want to follow my lead.

These granola bars have spared me from some hangry moments lately. They’re satisfying, just sweet enough, and stick with me for a few hours. Granola bars to the rescue!

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Do you love granola? Me, too! Today, I’m sharing my “basic” granola recipe, which is also the best granola recipe. Granted, I’m partial, but it really is the best and I use that term sparingly. Over two hundred five-star reviews agree!

In fact, I love this recipe so much that I shared it in my cookbook, Love Real Food. This granola makes a wonderful snack or breakfast (add your milk of choice and maybe some fresh fruit). It also stores beautifully, so it makes a great homemade gift.

Once you try homemade granola, you won’t go back to store-bought granola. It’s so much better!

This granola recipe is also a far more healthy granola option, since it’s made with whole grains, unrefined oil and naturally sweetened. You just can’t beat freshly baked granola packed with delicious and good-for-you ingredients.

Plus, homemade granola is super easy to make. You’ll only need one bowl and some basic pantry ingredients. Ready to make some?

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Of all the granola recipes on this blog, this orange-infused granola might be my new favorite. Granted, I’m on an orange kick right now (don’t miss this orzo salad and this green salad).

The combination of fresh orange zest, honey, cinnamon, toasted almonds, vanilla and golden raisins is undeniably divine. It reminds me of the flavors I encountered in my celebratory post-cookbook trip to Morocco this spring.

On the solo leg of my trip, I remember spreading homemade orange jelly across pastries in the gorgeous riad where I was staying, feeling both spoiled and lonely. The sights and scents were too beautiful to keep to myself.

This granola would be a fun and simple weekend project to make with your loved ones. It would also make a delicious gift for your friends, family or new neighbors. Enjoy it plain as a snack, or add milk or yogurt for a wholesome breakfast.

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Apple season is here! I’m usually so sad to see summer and its glorious produce go, but I’m actually looking forward to slowing down this fall. I’m going to bust out my cozy jackets and boots from their hiding places and take my dog Cookie out to admire the changing leaves.

To celebrate the beginning of fall, I made a big kale salad with chopped apple and a lemony maple and mustard dressing. Goat cheese, cranberries and savory granola—yes, granola on a salad—round it out and make this salad a full meal.

I’m fully smitten with this granola-as-croutons concept, since I never have a loaf of crusty bread when I need it. You can toss it together in no time at all, and you’ll end up with plenty for two salads.

As you’ve probably heard already, old-fashioned oats offer a number of beneficial qualities—they’re a good source of fiber, vitamins and minerals—so these croutons are more redeeming than most.

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My grandmother Mimi passed along quite a few traits to me, her only granddaughter. I inherited her eyes, her name (hence the ‘e’ at the end of Kathryne), her sweet tooth, and her love for pecans, among others. I mentioned this in my cookbook, but Mimi’s family owned a small pecan tree farm, so she enjoyed a lot of pecans in her long life.

When the recently-formed American Pecan Council asked me to develop a recipe featuring pecans, the answer was easy. “Challenge accepted!” I came up with these pecan granola bars, which are bursting with warm, sweet, delicate pecan flavor.

I started by toasting the pecans on the stove (I’m not turning on the oven unless absolutely necessary this summer). Then, I whipped some of those fragrant toasted pecans into pecan butter, which is so good. If you haven’t tried it yet, you have been missing out.

Add some maple syrup, cinnamon, oats, and chopped toasted pecans, and you’ve made a batch of wholesome and delicious homemade granola bars. I even pressed pecans into the top to highlight their supreme pecan-ness. You can skip that step if it seems like too much trouble, but I think they’re cute that way.

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I brought these granola bars with me on a recent weekend getaway, tucked beside my neglected laptop. I’m so glad I did.

No time for breakfast? Granola bars to the rescue. Hungry on the plane? Granola bars sure beat pretzels. Long stretch between lunch and dinner? Again, granola bars.

These bars kept my blood sugar levels stable and kept me from turning into a cranky, hypoglycemic mess.

These no-bake bars, made with oats, nuts, and coconut, and naturally sweetened with honey (or maple syrup) are effective, energy-rich treats. I’ll never travel without them again.

They would also be great snacks for lunch bags and hungry kids who have just arrived home from school. They’re much more tasty and offer more sticking power than any of the store-bought options I encountered as a kid. Homemade granola bars for the win!

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I may have implied otherwise, but the cookbook is definitely not done. I’m wrapping up some final food photo shoots this week, and working with a local photographer to take some fun shots of Cookie and me. I have about one million photos of Cookie, but very few of us together, so I’m looking forward to having those.

We also have several rounds of edits to go, and the design process is just beginning. Eek! It’s too much, but I’m giving it my all.

I’ve been feeling sentimental for simpler times, like the family reunions on July 4th that I mentioned earlier this week. Then I got to thinking about all those potato chips, and the value of a good breakfast, so I started daydreaming about a festive, but wholesome, Independence Day breakfast.

I landed here—a red, white, and blue bowl of yogurt, granola and berries. Can we take a moment to commend the Founding Fathers for choosing such a classic color combination? It doesn’t get better than star-spangled red, white and blue.

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Good morning from New York! I am perched on a cushy hotel bed, with a window overlooking TriBeCa on my left and a bag of homemade granola bars to my right. I’m here because you all voted for my roasted cauliflower lentil tacos when I asked you to. Thank you so much!

The USA Dry Pea and Lentil Council flew me out here to attend their event. The United Nations designated 2016 to be the International Year of Pulses (think beans, chickpeas and lentils) for their significant health, economic and environmental benefits. We’re going to celebrate tonight with farmers, chefs and magazine editors. Party on, lentils!!!

These granola bars survived the trip intact, so I can vouch for their portability. I got the idea to make a cranberry orange version of my almond chocolate chip granola bars from Lilly, who commented on my cranberry orange granola recipe and asked how to turn the granola into granola bars.

I offered some suggestions but couldn’t get Lilly’s idea out of my head, so here we are. Wholesome, honey-sweetened, cranberry-orange granola bars made with lots of healthy whole grains, nuts and seeds. These no-bake granola bars would also make great “energy bites,” too, if you’d rather roll the dough between your palms to make one-inch balls. If you appreciate cranberry orange muffins and the like, you’ll love these!

Thank you to Lilly for this idea, and for all of you who come over and leave comments with ideas, questions and suggestions. I read each one and try my very best to respond to every single one of them. I’m always bragging on you guys for being so wonderful. Thank you for voting for my tacos, too! I’ll share my New York adventures on Snapchat today (I’m @cookieandkate), if you’d like to follow along.

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I feel like I’ve been trudging through mud all week. That’s a phrase my mom uses fairly often when she’s having a hard time getting stuff done. For some reason, I’ve always imagined that the mud is actually chocolate pudding, which offers a more delicious visual.

So I’ve been trudging through chocolate pudding all week. Obstacles here, there, everywhere! I can’t tell you how many trips to the grocery store I’ve made over the past few days. You know how it goes. The first grocery store is out of Brussels sprouts, the second doesn’t carry spring roll wrappers and the third store’s freezer section doesn’t offer any frozen spinach. Then you finally get home and realize that you forgot to put Parmesan on the list. Good grief.

That’s not just me, right? I’ve decided that my version of paradise includes a grocery store that carries everything I need. No, I take that back—my version of paradise includes a self-stocking kitchen. Why doesn’t that exist yet? It’s 2015!

I found myself day-dreaming about self-stocking kitchens while this granola filled my house with the heavenly scent of fresh orange and warm maple syrup. I’ve been on a granola kick again and this kind is my new favorite. It’s extra clumpy and extra delicious.

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I basically survived on granola bars in high school. Pre-packaged, too sweet, milk chocolate granola bars at lunch and before volleyball practice. Every day. Naturally, I’ve been pretty burnt out on granola bars for the past ten years.

Then my friend Sara (whom I met through the blog) texted me the ingredients list for a granola bar and requested that I recreate them. I trust Sara’s taste in granola bars and thought I’d better give these a shot, so I stopped at the local coffee shop to pick one up.

I made it to my car before peeling off the packaging. One bite and I was hooked. This granola bar was unlike any other granola bar I’d ever encountered. I tasted honey, sea salt, dark chocolate, oats and cinnamon all at once—each flavor teetered on the edge of overwhelming the others yet somehow the sum was perfectly balanced.

Plus, unlike those packaged, processed granola bars I’d grown up eating, these were legitimately healthy granola bars. I immediately added the ingredients on the back of the package to my grocery list and headed to the store.

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