Cold Salads and Homemade Granola. Not together.

After last night's grocery store frenzy and the amount of money I spent on snacks, I wondered if making our own granola bars would be cost effective and/or tasty.  I had bought the ingredients a month or two ago, so I'm going to have to hold off on calculating their cost, but the taste of the homemade bars gets a thumbs up! 

I got the recipe from Hannaford's free grocery magazine, either Fresh or Organic & Natural.  They have great recipes in them, and great coupons in the Organic one since not a lot of those products have coupons in the Sunday circulars.  I made a few changes to the recipe (Get Smart Granola Bars), using dried cranberries in place of blueberries, and baking them on a large cookie sheet instead of in a 9x13 pan.  Owen enjoyed measuring and mixing, and overall they were way easy, sweetened with brown sugar and honey and containing oats, wheat germ, flax, rice cereal, and only half a stick of butter.

I finally got around to washing up the veggies from the CSA pick up on Saturday, so we had a bunch of salads tonight for dinner, along with Kira's favorite Black Bean and Corn salad.  The lettuce from the farm is so tasty, I can't imagine I ever ate out of those bags before.  I also made a kale slaw that has a peanut vinaigrette on it with carrots and peppers.

I boiled up the Choiggia beets--I'm learning to only get enough for myself--and sliced them on top of my green salad sprinkled with blue cheese.  They are the prettiest beet to slice.  Funny aside: when I was looking up info on these beets, and how to spell them, the Google search page showed the following at the bottom of the page!

Searches related to beet varieties

sugar beet varieties
beet dictionary
beer varieties
radish varieties

turnip varieties
carrot varieties
harpsichord
the empire strikes back

Huh??? Harpsichord is bizarre enough, but The Empire Strikes Back?  How does that relate to the beets?

Here's a funny site of crazy Google Search bar suggestions.