Granola Bar Cookie

I am always looking for recipes to use up the random ingredients in my kitchen or pantry. Today I wanted to use up some very ripe bananas, but did not want banana bread and did not want to use up the last of my butter. So I did a search and found a recipe that not only used up my bananas, but would use up some of the rolled oats (NOT QUICK OATS) that I have wanted to use. I made a few modifications so I will present it as I made it.

Ingredients

• 3 ripe bananas
• 1.5 cups rolled oats (Recipe called for all oats, but I was hoping the granola might add some crunch. A few people recommended adding grape nuts right before cooking for crunch--I read that note after they were already in the oven or I would have tried)
  
• 1.5 cups low fat raisin granola (in future I would avoid the raisins- some of them plumped into grapes)
  
• chopped dried apricots (some people liked dried apples, dates, pretty much any dried fruit you like or have on hand. Just enough to mix evenly throughout)
  
• 1/3 cup applesauce
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. In a large bowl, mash the bananas. Stir in the rest of the ingredients. Mix well, and allow to sit for 15 minutes. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto an ungreased cookie sheet.
3. Recipe calls for 20 minutes in the preheated oven, or until lightly brown. It took a full 30 minutes for us to get browned.

When warm, they taste like a chewy granola bar. I imagine that they will get crunchier as they cool. Some negative comments online were that these turned out rubbery. Mine did not, but I am guessing that if you used something other than rolled or steel cut oats that would be the reason.

Overall, I think that they are pretty tasty. And they were fun for Ellis to make. She did ALL the mixing, and placing on the cookie sheets!