Chewy Fruity Breakfast Bars

Some days I have classes really early, so I was looking for the perfect breakfast bar recipe that would be filling and last for a long time in the fridge (so I don't have to start baking weekly before class!). Of course, I also wanted to look forward to eating this thing early in the morning. After some searching around the internet, I didn't find any recipe that seemed just right, so of course I just mashed together a couple of recipes and then took it from there to make up my own. 

I took inspiration from recipes by Alton Brown and another blog I found called One Hundred Eggs. Actually, the baking instructions are almost entirely from the latter, as the method of cooking these bars generally stays the same. It's a pretty flexible recipe in general, so you should feel free to swap some of the dried fruit for other dried fruit you like, or some of the nuts for other kinds of nuts. Just make sure the moisture to dry content ratio stays about the same to get the chewy bar texture we're seeking here.

A single portion of the finished product

Cranberry & Caramelized Apple Chicken

Here's another fall/winter favorite. I came up with this recipe sometime last year when I was thinking about cranberry crunch and I decided it would be great to turn it into a chicken recipe (well, maybe minus the crunch).

This is a fairly easy recipe which packs HUGE amounts of flavor. There's something special about the combination of brown sugar, apples, cinnamon and cranberries. It's very important to make sure you get the cranberry sauce with whole cranberries - that give the necessary texture, to the final sauce; plus, it's already sweetened so you don't need to add anything extra to it.

Also, there are two ways you could go about caramelizing the apples: you can use white sugar and melt it, creating caramel, and then toss in the apples; or you can use brown sugar, which seems to dissolve a lot more readily (probably because it's got the moisture of molasses built-in) and then toss the apples in that. The first time I made this recipe I used white sugar, but this last time I was in a rush so I used brown.

The difference is the time and care that the caramelization takes with white sugar (it does take quite a few minutes for it to melt...using the oil was my shortcut to make this happen slightly quicker since oil is a good conductor), and the fact that you need to be careful to stop the cooking before it burns (accomplished by adding the apples to drop the temperature of the skillet). With the brown sugar, it seems you just don't need to wait as long and it doesn't seem to be as finicky a process. The end result though, in my opinion, is that the white sugar method tastes a lot richer and sweeter than the brown, but the brown works just as well if you're short on time.

Is it chicken? Is it dessert? I don't know but it's very addicting.