Miles is in a phase where his diet is about 50% cinnamon graham crackers.  Recently, the store was out of his favorite brand, so I got generic, and His Highness was not pleased.  To his credit, I tried one and they really weren’t as good as his usual kind.

So anyway, I was looking to use up the extra graham crackers, and I found a recipe that looked like I could adapt it to include them.  These are really, really good.  I am going to have to hide them from myself to keep from eating the whole pan.  They’re pretty soft and slightly chewy, and they hit the spot on an icy day.

Oatmeal Peanut Butter Bars

• 1 sleeve cinnamon (or plain) graham crackers, pulverized in a food processor.  This should yield a generous cup of crumbs.
• 1 stick (1/2 cup) butter
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/3 cup peanut butter
• 1/2 tsp kosher salt (or 1/4 tsp table salt)
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 cup rolled oats
• 1/2-1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips, depending on how chocolatey you like your life

1. Heat oven to 325 F.  Spray an 8″x8″ or 9″x9″ pan with baking spray.
2. Grind up your graham crackers.
3. In a standing or with a hand-held mixer, mix butter and brown sugar until fluffy.  Add egg, vanilla, and peanut butter; mix.  In a separate bowl, mix graham cracker crumbs, salt, and baking soda.  Add to peanut butter mixture and mix until well-blended.  Finally, mix in oats.
4. Press into the prepared pan with the back of a spoon or your hands.  Bake for approximately 20 minutes, or until the edges begin to brown.
5. Immediately sprinkle the hot bars with chocolate chips.  Let them sit for a few minutes until they’re glossy, then spread them out to form the topping.

There is nothing better over ice cream.  Keep in mind I’m not an out-of-her-mind chocolate fan.  I like chocolate and all, but if there’s a vanilla or fruit or caramel or nut alternative, I’ll take that.

This salted caramel sauce is so, so good.  I made it to go on a turtle pie, and I’ve been consuming the leftovers steadily.  For those of you who must have chocolate, I bet this would be good alongside hot fudge sauce for a kind of one-two punch situation.

Salted Caramel Sauce

• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup water
• 5 tablespoons butter, in pieces
• 1/2 cup heavy cream
• generous pinch kosher salt

In a heavy-duty saucepan that’s bigger than what you’d think you’d need (seriously, err on the side of large), dissolve the sugar in the water over medium-high heat.  Once it’s dissolved, stop stirring.  Just let it boil, swirling the pan occasionally, and brushing down the sides now and then with a water-moistened brush.

Once the sugar is a nice medium amber, remove it from the heat.  Add the butter and stir until it’s fully melted.  Pour in the cream, watch it bubble up like crazy, and stir with a whisk until it’s smooth and uniform.  Add the kosher salt and stir some more.  Don’t lick any utensils, no matter how much you want to, because this stuff is HOT and you will regret it so deeply.

The sauce will thicken as it cools.  I suppose it will keep in the fridge for a while, though it never lasts very lost.

Last night I made my old favorite Pork with Grapes and Onions.

Tonight I’m getting a bit more ambitious and making this lasagne.  I have tomato sauce in the freezer (well, actually it’s simmering on the stove right now, but until recently it was in the freezer) from last summer’s tomato harvest, so I substituted that for the canned tomatoes and omitted the basil and salt, since those were already in the sauce.

There are a few unusual things about this recipe that I like:

• Fresh mozzarella instead of aged
• Goat cheese
• A genius technique for noodle management that involves soaking the pasta in hot tap water.  This is so much easier than boiling an enormous pot of water for the lasagne noodles, fishing them out and burning your fingers in the process.  And yet, it yields better results than any no-boil technique or product I’ve tried.

I’m hungry already.

Another song we’re singing is John Denver’s “Country Roads.”  Miles listened carefully to the lyrics and had a couple of questions.

In response to “Country roads, take me home”:

M:  How do the country roads know where him or her lives?

He also wasn’t sure about the term “mountain mama.”  I told him maybe the songwriter’s mom lived in the mountains, so he called her that.

M:  Just one question:  If his mom lives in a mountain, where do they sleep?

A:  Maybe they have a house right next to a mountain.

M:  Maybe they sleep on a bench.

Miles and I have recently joined a family choir.  One of the songs the kids are singing is “Yellow Submarine.”  As we left rehearsal last night…

M:  We all live in a primary-colored submarine, a primary-colored submarine, a primary-colored submarine.