Chewy Granola Bites

I love snacks. Growing-up I ate more snacks than anyone else I knew. I seemed to always be snacking. When I don't snack I get very cranky, not just a little bit but I literally go from nice to mean in a matter of seconds. A lot of it has to do with my blood sugar. When I was pregnant with my youngest son they had me monitor my blood sugar levels and it turned out that my blood sugar crashes relatively frequently. When my blood sugar crashes I turn nasty. So I make sure to keep high protein healthy snacks around to avoid these mood swings. My two boys can be just as grumpy as I can without snacks. In particular my oldest has a hard time focusing on school work and gets in far more trouble when he doesn't eat enough. I am always on the lookout for new recipes and last week I tried a new one for Chewy Granola Bites from Parents magazine, which looked perfect for snacking.

This recipe has 5 ingredients. It takes 20 minutes of total time, 15 minutes of which is active and makes approximately 30 balls. I made a number of modifications to this recipe. First I am not a fan of regular white rice cereal and my local grocery store didn't have brown rice cereal, so I substituted flax cereal instead. I chose to use almond butter, I prefer the taste and texture in recipes. Finally I ran out of granola (thanks to my husband and two boys eating most of the bag) so I only used a cup of granola and 1 1/2 cups of flax cereal. Instead of making thirty balls, I made my snacks larger and had a total of 15. I followed the remainder of the recipe as written.

My two boys loved these snacks. They literally ate them all in one afternoon. I like that they are no-bakes and take very little effort to put together. They are so easy that my oldest was able to help me with the entire recipe. Plus they are full of nutrition from the peanut butter and flax cereal.

For the recipe go to Chewy Granola Bites.