Or, as promised: the date bars that would have been really good in Yosemite if I hadn’t completely forgotten them and left them at home. And a digression about granny baking.
Never mind my memory and its lapses – this is the kind of recipe you need in your collection. It’s reliable, travels well (when you remember to pack it…), is perfect pot-luck/picnic/BBQ food, and has that touch of old school home-made goodness just like grandma used to make. If you are looking for Labor Day party contributions, this is a real contender.
In my case, my grandmother did not make anything like this at all. Granny’s baking was usually, in my experience, less “rustic” looking than mine. She trained at the Cordon Bleu cooking school in London just after she married my grandad, and if that is not setting a high bar for domestic bliss, I don’t know what is. Her kitchen turned out prize-winning strawberry jam (called “strawberry-auberry”, and pronounced with a very posh English accent) (yes, seriously), delicate almond cakes, and various frangipane tarts of which I was very fond. She also did flower-arranging for her church and took a group of WW2 veterans to Wimbledon every year for tennis, strawberries, and cream.
In case this makes you think that my granny was born with a silver spoon in her very-well-turned out mouth, you’d be sorely mistaken. Granny left home when she was still pretty tiny. As a teenager, she worked as a nurse in a fever hospital, and I don’t know much about this (granny mostly told me about the bright red woolen cape that she wore back then. Sign of a bad job? You focus on your clothing choices and mention nothing else), but I can only assume that this was not a great job because they employed untrained and relatively uneducated sixteen-year-olds to take care of contagious folks who were separated from other kinds of patients. She got after it, trained and worked as a (non-fever) nurse during the war, met my grandad, and then went to the fancy cooking school because she had no idea how to do most domestic stuff. She had been working for her meals, thank you very much, and didn’t have a lot of time or space in which to make them. It was a massive sign of how her life had changed after the war that she got to take time to make sweets for her family. She did not want rustic. She wanted to show off for the ladies at her tennis club. I can only imagine what granny’s insta feed would have looked like.
I am no-one’s granny, but I like food that: comes in bars, contains dried fruit, comes with oaty rubble on top (exhibit A), and possibly reflects my Midwest childhood more than anything else. I first made these bars as a grad student living in the North of England (near where my granny’s fever hospital once stood, incidentally), longing for home and comfort. It’s funny how our kitchens can show us these little flashes of insight about where we are, where we’re from (though not necessarily in the way you’d think), and where we want to go.
I like to think that granny would approve of this blog, though she would no doubt have things to tell me about how to polish up my recipes. And you can bet that she’s mention the heck out of this to the ladies at the club.
- 1½ cups/8 oz of soft dates - I used medjool
- ¾ cup of water (or more, depending on how dry your dates are)
- 4 tablespoons of butter
- 4 tablespoons of olive oil
- 2 tablespoons of dark brown sugar
- 1¼ cups rolled oats
- ¾ cup whole wheat flour
- a generous grating of nutmeg
- ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
- ¼ teaspoon baking soda
- Heat oven to 400F/200C
- Grease an 8 x 8 (inches) square pan
- Remove the pits from the dates and add the pitted fruit and the water to a small pot. Simmer over medium heat and squash the dates and water together until you have a thick paste. This should take about 5 minutes.
- In a microwave-safe bowl, melt the butter and olive oil together.
- Measure out 1 cup of oats and blend with a hand blender (food processor, etc) until the oats are broken slightly - you want the texture of instant/porridge oats here. There should be some floury bits, some small oats, and a few untouched flakes. Alternately, use 1 cup of instant/porridge oats.
- Combine the oil/butter, processed oats, sugar, flour, spices, baking soda, and remaining ¼ cup rolled oats in a medium bowl. Mix together until you get a coarse rubble.
- Press ¾ of the rubble down into the base of the baking pan. Add the date paste and spread to cover the base. Top with the remaining oaty rubble and lightly press into the dates. There will be gaps between the topping and the date mixture.
- Bake for 25 minutes, or until lightly golden. Cool in pan.
Sympathyflowers
August 24, 2017 at 10:11 amDoes your website have a contact page? I’m having a tough time locating it but, I’d like to shoot you an email. I’ve got some creative ideas for your blog you might be interested in hearing. Either way, great blog and I look forward to seeing it expand over time.