A sweet treat for cookie monsters: These peanut butter oat bars made my mother happy in the last year of her life

I first made this recipe for peanut butter-oatmeal bars years ago for my mother Jan, who I called Taffy. In the last year of her life, when she was suffering from full-on Alzheimer’s disease, Taffy was a fiend for sweet things, particularly cookies.

I first made this recipe for peanut butter-oatmeal bars years ago for my mother Jan, who I called Taffy. In the last year of her life, when she was suffering from full-on Alzheimer’s disease, Taffy was a fiend for sweet things, particularly cookies. PHOTO BY TINKY WEISBLAT

Mixing the ingredients together for the peanut butter oat bars.

Mixing the ingredients together for the peanut butter oat bars. PHOTO BY TINKY WEISBLAT

In honor of the late President Jimmy Carter, I decided to make something with peanuts or peanut butter. Carter was a peanut farmer before he went into politics.

In honor of the late President Jimmy Carter, I decided to make something with peanuts or peanut butter. Carter was a peanut farmer before he went into politics. PHOTO BY TINKY WEISBLAT

By TINKY WEISBLAT

For the Recorder

Published: 01-21-2025 9:55 AM

A couple of weeks ago, I wanted to bring something sweet to a meeting. The meeting took place on our National Day of Mourning for the late President Jimmy Carter so I decided to make something with peanuts or peanut butter. Carter was a peanut farmer before he went into politics.

I rifled through my recipe files and found something that not only included peanut butter (not a lot, but as it happened the exact amount I had in my pantry) but counted as doubly seasonal since it featured oats.

January is after all National Oatmeal Month … as well as National Soup Month, National Candy Month, National Hot Tea Month, National Prune Breakfast Month, National Citrus Month, National Egg Month, and paradoxically both National Meat Month and Veganuary. (I will not be celebrating all of these.)

I first made this recipe for peanut butter-oatmeal bars years ago for my mother Jan, who I called Taffy. Taffy spent much of her life eating very few sweets. Her idea of a fabulous dessert was fresh fruit.

She avoided sweets in part because she was always battling her weight. (I can relate to that!) She also avoided them, she informed me, because she really didn’t particularly care for them.

At the end of her life, that changed. Like many older people, my mother lost some of her sense of taste. I don’t know why this astonished me since she definitely lost much of her capacity for seeing, hearing, and smelling things. Losing one’s taste buds, I gathered, was a natural occurrence in the old.

Nevertheless, it always took me a little by surprise when she wasn’t interested in foods that had formerly delighted her, particularly slightly spicy foods: curry, salsa, and so forth.

Even odder, given her past, was her sudden passion for sweets.

In the last year of her life, when she was suffering from full-on Alzheimer’s disease, Taffy was a fiend for sweet things, particularly cookies. She would nibble vaguely at a sandwich for lunch and then request dessert when the main course was less than a quarter eaten. Clearly, she could still taste sweets if very little else.

While this struck me as uncharacteristic of the woman I had known all my life, it gave me leverage. I generally tried to avoid infantilizing her. When it came to nutrition, however, I had no trouble treating her like a small child. I told her that she might have dessert if she ate most of her “real” food.

I think her desire for sweets related to her memory issues as well as her taste buds. She frequently forgot that she had eaten. About an hour after lunch she would frequently inform me that I hadn’t fed her in a couple of days. The sugar high from sweets gave her an immediate feeling of having been fed.

I muddled along, mixing as many healthy things into her diet as I could (thus the oats in these bars) but being sure to give her a cookie or two each day. She was no longer at all heavy, and if small things made her happy, I believed she should have them.

She helped me assemble for these bars. Although she had lost much of her skill as a cook, she still wanted to be useful so I encouraged her to help out in the kitchen. Working together cheered us both.

We tried the bars both with and without the chocolate chips. Not surprisingly, my cookie monster preferred the chocolate-infused version. I liked the bars’ chewiness.

I also liked the fact that we didn’t end up with too large a batch of sweets. I didn’t want to run the risk that Taffy would raid the cookie jar and make herself sick.

You’ll note from the photo of her mixing the batter that at the time our hand mixer was operating on one oar. I eventually found the other beater, but it took a while. In the meantime, we used the mixer as it was.

Dealing with dementia trains a person to be patient, and I decided that one beater was better than no beaters at all.

Happy oatmeal month! If you get half as much pleasure out of these bars as Taffy did, you will be happy indeed.

Cookie Monster Peanut Butter-Oat Bars

Ingredients:

1/2 cup (1 stick) sweet butter at room temperature

1/3 cup peanut butter

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 brown sugar, firmly packed

1 egg

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup flour

1 cup oats (regular, not quick cooking)

1 cup chocolate chips

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8-inch-square baking dish.

Combine the butter and the peanut butter. Cream in the sugars. Beat in the egg, followed by the baking powder, the salt, and the vanilla. Stir in the remaining ingredients.

Dollop the batter into the prepared pan (it will be thick) and bake until the mixture is golden brown in spots, 25 to 30 minutes.

Allow the mixture to cool slightly before cutting it into bars; then let the bars cool completely before you remove them from the pan. (If you can’t wait for them to cool, they will be tasty but messy.)

Makes 16 squares, more or less, depending on how you cut them.

Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.