Oat Fruit Bars

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Healthy oats and fresh fruit make a sweet, delicious breakfast treat or snack.

Servings 9 squares or so (recipe can be doubled—bake in a 9x13 or 10x14 pan)

Equipment

8x8 baking pan

Ingredients

For the batter:

1 cup rolled oats
3/4 cup unbleached white flour (see Kitchen Notes)
1/3 cup dark brown sugar, packed
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted, plus more for greasing the pan

For the fruit:

1-1/2 cups strawberries, hulled and chopped
1-1/2 cups fresh peaches, two peaches, halved, pitted and chopped (no need to peel)
1/2 cup white granulated sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch
2 teaspoons lemon juice

Instructions

First, prepare the batter. Heat the butter in a microwave or a small pan on the stove just until it is melted. In a medium bowl, stir together the oats, flour, brown sugar, nutmeg and salt. Then, using your nice clean hands, mix in the butter, working everything until it is a crumbly mass with the butter evenly dispersed. If it has little chunks here and there, that's okay.
Prepare an 8x8 baking pan by greasing it with butter. Put 3/4 of the oat batter in the pan and press it down uniformly, again using your hands, so it is uniformly thick.
Preheat oven to 350ºF.
Next, prepare the fruit—do not do this first (See Kitchen Notes)! Chop the fruit, then put it in a small bowl and stir in the sugar, cornstarch and lemon juice. Immediately pour the fruit into the baking pan and lightly spread it around on top of the oat mixture so it's uniform. Do not press it down into place.
Finally, crumble the remaining oat mixture over the top. Put the pan in the heated oven and bake for 35 to 40 minutes until the top is golden and toasty and the fruit juices are a little bubbly. Remove the pan from the oven and let it cool on a rack. Leave it be until it is completely room temperature. That's it! You're done.
The baked bars may be frozen, tightly wrapped.

Kitchen Notes

Subbing the flour. Instead of white flour, you may substitute white whole wheat flour, or make this gluten free by substituting any 1:1 gluten-free flour.

Prepare the fruit last. Do not do this first! Mixing in the sugar will prompt the fruit to release a huge amount of liquid which could make your finished bars a soggy mess. We learned this the hard way.

Liz’s Crockery Corner. Back in 1936. the Homer Laughlin China Company launched a new line of dishes, Fiesta Ware, which, with its intense, jaunty colors and modern design, became an immediate, enormous commercial success. Fiesta Ware is still regarded as a revolutionary product thanks to two bold marketing choices. First was a design choice—Fiesta dishes are all solid colors, unlike pretty much every dish made in the US and Europe up to then. And also unlike every dish made in the US and Europe up to then, Fiesta Ware was sold not in sets but as open stock. You could, for the first time, mix and match colors to create a set unique to you.

The cheerful little plate above, however, is not Fiesta, but another Homer Laughlin product—Riviera. The Homer Laughlin Company understood that, in the depths of the Depression, lots of people might love, and long for, Fiesta Ware, but that not everyone could afford even its modest price. To manufacture Riviera, the company used the dishes from another, more lightweight pattern, Century, and dipped them in the beautiful Fiesta colors. Riviera pieces originally cost about 40 percent less than Fiesta and were sold, also as open stock, in G. W. Murphy dime stores. This cheerful little plate, which we found years ago in a flea market in Michigan, is in the original light green. You can still find Riviera dishes in this color, as well as cobalt blue, yellow, ivory and even the notorious, radioactive uranium-oxide red.

The Homer Laughlin Company, by the way, has had an interesting history. Founded in 1871 in West Liverpool, Ohio, it began moving its operations to West Virginia in the 1890s. Its descendant, the Fiesta Tableware Company, still operates a 37-acre manufacturing facility there today.