Great Grainy Granola, Batman!

Back when people were still giving me food because I'd recently squeezed a human out of an orifice no bigger than- well, a seven pound baby, apparently- one particular friend brought me the most amazing granola bars.  They were perfect for a new mother: dense in calories and easy to eat one-handed at 0300 during yet another session of breast-feeding.  Plus they were delicious.  I went through them more quickly than I'd have liked, and before too long I was begging her for the recipe so I could make my own.

She pointed me towards Smitten Kitchen, I immediately got to mixin', and was soon rewarded with a brand new (double) batch.  Hooray!

But as we all know, I like to tweak and fiddle with recipes to better suit my personal tastes, and soon I was tweaking and fiddling away at this one.  I won't bore you with all the iterations it's gone through, but I will share with you today's version, which is not quite there in my estimation, but at least has the proper fruit-to-chocolate ratio I was craving:

mmm, millet seed

Dry Ingredients:
2.5 c. rolled oats
1/2 c. oat flour
1.5 c. shredded coconut
2/3 c. uncooked millet
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. cardamom
1 c. dried blueberries
1.5 c. craisins
3/4 c. dark chocolate chips

Wet Ingredients: 
1/2 c. sunflower seed butter
1/2 c. coconut oil warmed to liquid
1/2 c. honey

Heat Oven to 350

Line 9"x13" pan with parchment paper

In large bowl, combine dry ingredients.  In small bowl, whisk wet ingredients together until smooth.  Pour wet into dry, and stir until combined.

Transfer mixture to prepared pan and spread evenly, then cover with parchment paper and use heavy book (and heavy husbeast, if handy) to press until it can be compressed no more.

Bake 30-40 minutes until top is golden and edges light brown.  Let cool completely (this takes near an hour) before cutting, or it will crumble.

Store in air-tight container, if it lasts that long.

I'm not totally sold on using sun-butter (mostly due to the sugar content), but I also wasn't sold on purely almond butter (mostly due to the fact that too much almond = sad times for my belly).  The best results I've gotten was doing half sun-butter and half almond-butter-sweetened-with-maple-syrup, but I think for my next batch I'm going to go with straight up tahini, to see how that goes.  I may still end up doing a blend in the end, but we'll see.

Whee!  Experimentation can be both fun and delicious!