Banana Oat Squares

Here’s the follow up recipe from 150 Delicious Squares (Amazon affiliate link) for the Noshing on Nostalgia series. This recipe comes from the debut recipe book that’s celebrating a 40 year anniversary this month. It’s older than me! (Barely, haha.)

There aren’t a lot of recipes in this book that my mom added her own notes to, but she’s made many of them. You can tell this a few ways. First, perusing the book from cover to cover, you’ll see check marks for every recipe she’s made. If you’re too busy to do that, you can go to the Index at the back and any recipe she’s made she has added an asterisk beside.

My goal with Noshing on Nostalgia isn’t to just share a recipe from an old family cookbook, but instead to show how my mom adjusted the recipes or include the recipes she’s tweaked over the years for whatever reason. It was important to me to have a recipe that she made her own. There’s not many here that she tweaked. I suspect because the recipes as is are pretty darn great. Also, I’m not willing to make a recipe using an insane amount of raisins because of my abhorrence of raisins. This is how I chose the recipe to try – Banana Oat Squares.

Here’s what I love about the original recipe. It says to bake it for almost an hour. What would you consider ‘almost an hour’? 45 minutes? 57 minutes? That’s a big time difference isn’t it? That sort of ‘just figure it out’ type of recipe makes me laugh. After creating recipes and posting recipes for public use since 2009, I feel like that sort of stuff would not fly in this modern age. I’d be hearing from people about a lack of clear instruction for sure. Thankfully, my mom’s notes are helpful. She indicates how long to bake the bars for – 40 minutes. That’s a lot less than ‘almost an hour’ in my books.

This recipe uses very limited, easily accessible ingredients in most of our kitchens. Maybe you’ll have to wait for bananas to ripen to make this, as I did, but otherwise everything else was on hand. This recipe also has nothing else like vanilla extract or cinnamon or anything added to it. This seemed strange to me, but I made it as written, with my mom’s adjustments and if I decide to improvise if/when I make these next time then I’ll update the recipe here with those suggestions and recommendations. As it is, the flavour of these bars are really great without needing anything else added.

When I filmed this video we had some workers in our back yard and so my pups were really invested in barking. I also ramble an awful lot. As I was editing the video I realized it’s way too long but I also really didn’t want to remake the recipe and re-do the video, so I cut out the audio, sped up the video, and added a voiceover with the pertinent information. It is pretty much exactly the “high quality content” you’re used to seeing from me. Hashtag authentic.