Peanut Butter Energy Bars

I should preface this with giving credit where credit is due. This recipe is basically just a variation of the recipes Georgia Gould put on her website. If you want her varieties, you should check them out here, http://georgiagould.com/blog/2012/02/the-best-homemade-energy-bars/. Her directions are also probably a bit better than mine.

When my mom was visiting she made two varieties of Georgia's recipes and they were awesome. My wife remade the fruits and nuts bar with some variation based on what we had on hand. They turned out really well also.

Peanut Butter Energy Bars --

Ingredients:

2C (cups) rice crispies
2C rolled oats
1 package of bacon (fried, then chopped into small pieces)
1C peanut butter chips (chocolate chip pieces but in peanut butter flavor. sometimes hard to find. I use chocolate chips as a substitute)

1C creamy peanut butter
1C brown rice syrup

Directions:

Put your dry goods into a large mixing bowl and pre-stir.

In a sauce pan, heat the peanut butter and brown rice syrup over medium heat until it's combined and pretty runny.

Pour over dry goods.

With a spatula or wooden spoon mix the rice syrup/pb with your dry goods. Work quickly because when this stuff starts to cool it's going to get hard really fast. After about a minute, ditch the spatula and use your hands mixing it all together into one big clump.

Pour your mixture into a greased (crisco works if you got it) brownie pan.

Press the shit out of it to flatten it as much as you can. You want to try and get it about an inch thick. This will make sure everything holds together later.

Set it aside to cool for at least 1 hour. 2-3 is better. You can even leave it over night if you don't have time to mess with it.

Once cool, use a butter knife to cut equally sized bars of whatever portion you want. Since you wont' be trying to eat them on a bike you don't need any fancy wrapping instructions. Aluminum foil will work just fine. Store them in the fridge, though I'm not sure this is actually necessary.

Roughly 200 calories per bar if they're about 2" squares.

If you want, you can basically substitute any dried fruits or nuts for the bacon and peanut butter chips. You can also use almond butter or sunflower seed butter instead of peanut butter if you wanted. The more ingredients you add, reduce your rice crispies and rolled oats to 1C each. I've done tons of varieties and haven't found anything that isn't good.