Nature provisions each child with a parent, as a way of ensuring her survival. And each parent with a child, as a way of ensuring her demise. Call it natural population control. Part of ensuring your child grows up is to feed her, and this will be your undoing.
It doesn’t look like a difficult task. Just pour the cornflakes into the bowl and let nature take its course. The cornflakes will settle into a sullen hush and so will the child. And while you might leave matters at that, dispatching cereal to the disposal and child to school, you suspect such haste would render you derelict in your duty: sustaining life.
You try the usual lame parenting antics. Threats. Rewards. But you feel foolish pointing to the uncooperative chair or the jellybean jar at 7 a.m. In a moment of calm, you consider that mealtime is the soul of family life and that young palates are tender and convenience almost always ends up inconvenient.
So you attempt to appease the girl gourmet. You find yourself shirring eggs and toasting ginger waffles and rendering Matisse’s Jazz in melted Nutella on pecan griddlecakes. While all this activity amuses your daughter, none of it reaches the stage of digestion when actual nutrition is achieved. You have been duped, again.
Then, from some recess of your sleep-deprived brain, comes a vision. It’s a rather prosaic vision, being brown and rectangular and raisin-spotted, but it is a vision no less. A vision from a time when, pre-parenthood, you lingered over brunch at Ina’s and indulged in scrapple and poached eggs and coffee with real cream. And sometimes, while waiting, in one of those heavenly oatmeal squares–or rather rectangles–dotted with raisins. You don’t even like raisins. But these blocks were so delicious they struck you as the perfect square meal. Breakfast in a bar. A concept long since ruined by the granola lobby, the Power Bar elite.
You call Ina Pinkney. Charming as ever, she copies down the recipe. It’s full of wholesome raisins and walnuts and oatmeal, suspended in a cloud of butter and molasses enticements. You stay up late beating and spreading and in the morning have a breakfast strategy at the ready: One plastic bag harboring four oatmeal rectangles.
The young ones, sensing brownie, bite. You smile one of those sly mother smiles. By the time you have your coffee dosed with cream, you find a mound of walnuts and oatmeal and raisins heaped on the plate, the bar’s sticky connective tissue having been skillfully gnawed away. Youth and ingenuity triumph, again.
SNEAKY OATMEAL BARS
Serves 24
2 sticks (8 ounces) butter
2 1/2 cups sugar
4 eggs
3/4 cup molasses
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 1/2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons salt
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
4 cups rolled oats
2 cups raisins
1 cup chopped walnuts
1. Cream butter with sugar until light and fluffy with an electric mixer. Add eggs, molasses and vanilla and mix until the batter looks fluffy again.
2. In a separate bowl wisk together flour, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. Add flour mixture to butter mixture and blend. Mix in oats, raisins and walnuts on low.
3. Spread the mixture in a rimmed 12 x18-inch baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Pat smooth with a well-floured hand. Bake at 350 degrees until the sides are set but the center is not yet firm, about 30 minutes.
4. Cool on a rack. Cut into 24 bars and enjoy. Or store in a plastic container in the freezer for those mornings when breakfast prep seems daunting.
–Adapted from Ina Pinkney’s recipe
