The Annunciation

For today's celebration of Mary's yes! to God's will, we're eating homemade blueberry oatmeal bars. I also brought these bars for our healthy-lunch recipe exchange play date yesterday. (Well, that's a mouthful.)

We had so much good food, but I thought it was a little silly for me to bring my recipe. You see, every kid there (except Joan) will eat blueberries and spinach (the recipe calls for a spinach puree) anyway - why would you want to make that more complicated? If my family did that, I'd just put blueberries and spinach leaves on a plate and say, "You're welcome."

But I guess it's good to mix it up a bit... Here's the recipe:

Nonstick cooking spray
2 cups whole-wheat old fashioned oats
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 cup all purpose flour
(the original recipe didn't have whole wheat flour and just used 1 1/4 all purpose)
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
3/4 cup Balance trans-fat-free soft tub margarine spread, chilled
1 cup low-sugar blueberry preserves
1/2 cup spinach puree

Preheat oven to 375, coat 8x8 baking pan with cooking spray. In large bowl, combine oats, flour, sugar, cinnamon, baking powder, salt and vanilla. Stir to mix well.

Add margarine and cut it in quickly until no longer powdery.

Set aside about half of oat mixture; press the rest of it firmly into pan. Bake until lightly browned at the edges (but not fully baked) about 15 minutes.

Mix the preserves with the spinach puree in a small bowl.

Spread the blueberry mixture over the partially baked oat layer, then sprinkle with rest of oat mixture on top. Bake until topping is slightly browned about 25 minutes. Set on rack to cool completely before cutting into 12 bars.

And here's my attempt at talking to Joan about the Annunciation. I don't always think about how or what I'm going to ask her, so the videos don't always turn out that great, but nonetheless, here it is.

dang. I just watched this and realized more of our conversation was cut off because of Flickr's time limit... too bad because I'm not trying to load it again anywhere else...