Clean Out Your Pantry Dairy-Free Fruit Bars (with the most amazing peanut butter caramel sauce)

It's spring cleaning time for many. For others, spring means frazzled schedules and balancing many events.

Some of your activities may require baked goods, or at least you need some decent snacks to keep you going. 

While others may throw in the towel, we rise to the challenge and meet it with deliciousness and a dash of light creativity. 

Enter- Clean Out Your Pantry Dairy-Free Fruit Bars. 

Hypothesis: The law of conservation (can't make something from nothing) does not hold true if you just believe and try! 

Raid your seemingly empty pantry and let's get started (and just casually challenge the laws of physics). 

Method

Recipe source: 

Very loosely based on https://www.ambitiouskitchen.com/apple-pie-bars/

Note: I'm sure they are very delicious as is! But today's experiment is about using what you have.

Dairy-Free Modifications: 

Butter: I would recommend my standard Imperial brand dairy-free margarine. The texture is not too finicky here, so this is a good opportunity to experiment with whatever you may have on hand. This might include other brands of dairy-free buttery sticks that seem a little softer, or coconut oil. 

As you'll read on, I actually just skipped this part all together. What?! Keep going! 

Procedures: 

1. If you want to use the recommended oat flour, this is pretty simple. Just blend some of your extra oats from when you bought a large container and thought, "this is a good idea." Then it sat in your pantry for months. Or, use up some extra all purpose wheat flour!

2. Mix up your dry ingredients for the base and topping. If you bought coconut sugar one time on a health kick and the half-used bag is languishing in your pantry, now is its second chance to shine! Or, like me and my basic pantry, you can certainly use regular sugar. 

3. Add in your butter. I think here, I used vegetable oil. See the results for more about whether this was a good decision. 

4. Press most of the mixture into the bottom of your pan as the base. Refrigerate the rest. 

5. Next, you could make the apple pie filling. In fact, I'm sure that's a good idea. Or, you can use whatever kind of fruit you got. I had extra dried apricots which I attempted to rehydrate a bit- I let them soak with some hot water and spices. 

6. Pour in your filling (or in my case, scatter). 

7. Then, crumble on the leftover mixture as a topping.

8. Bake! 

9. While baking, now it's time for that AMAZING peanut butter caramel sauce. It really makes this dish. First, melt together a little bit of "butter" substitute (you don't want vegetable or canola oil here, you want it to resolidify a bit at room temperature) and the other ingredients. I like that the author acknowledged that I am going to do this in the microwave and not over the stovetop. 

10. Now, wait patiently until the bars are done. By the time the bars are done, the caramel will have thickened up a bit. 

11. Pour over and wait a few more minutes. 

Results

Bon appetit! 

Discussion

We can make something from nothing! Or more likely, we often underestimate what we have right in front of us. 

I'm a psychologist, not a physicist, so I'm sure there's more nuance to the law of conservation than I'm describing. So maybe I'm biased, but perhaps the lesson is more about gratitude. As we spring clean or go through a busy season, we can be both stressed and grateful for our abundance, even when it doesn't feel like it. 

Some limitations: As noted, I did use canola oil instead of the recommended butter stick for the base and filling. The result was a lot more crumbly than I aimed for, but it was still delicious and made a great little weekday treat. 

Future directions: I'm going to use this caramel sauce on everything! What ingredients do you want to use up in the near future?