Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Bars

School starts next week. I am twenty-two weeks pregnant with twins and teaching a full-time classroom and the math on this is: the school year ends in June, the babies come in November, I will be back in January at the earliest. I have been thinking about this transition all summer and trying to feel prepared for it, and I mostly am, and there is also a part of me that is afraid of not teaching, which is the part that knows how central it is to who I am.

I went to set up my classroom this week and spent four hours doing it, slower than usual, with more sitting than standing. The sensory corner has the beanbag chair. The transition support materials are in place. The visual schedules are printed and laminated. Everything I know how to do is in place. My students will arrive on Monday and I will be at the door and I will say their names and the year will begin, and at some point this fall I will stop coming to the door and someone else will be there, and they will be fine because I will have made sure they know how to manage without me. That is the whole job. Make yourself unnecessary to the daily operation. That is how you know you have succeeded.

Cooking this week has been full second trimester energy: I made a mole sauce from scratch, which is a full-day project that requires a lot of dried chilis and chocolate and patience and an immersion blender. It came out dark and complex and Ryan ate it over chicken and said it tasted like something from a restaurant he had been to exactly once and never found again. I said I could make it again. He said he was going to hold me to that. I said he could hold me to a lot of things.

The blog announced the twins this week. The comment section was chaos in the best possible way. People with twin stories, twin advice, twin warnings delivered with love. The blog has become a community in a way I did not design and could not have designed. I just kept writing. Here we are.

The mole was the main event this week, the all-day project that earned its own paragraph above. But the thing I kept coming back to, the thing I made twice because the first batch disappeared before Tuesday, was these bars. They have that same deep chocolate thing going on, and they come together in a fraction of the time, and when I brought a tray to school for the staff room on setup day, three people asked for the recipe before lunch. When you are twenty-two weeks pregnant and nesting in two places at once, you need at least one thing in your kitchen that is simple and warm and requires no immersion blender.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 25 minutes | Total Time: 40 minutes | Servings: 24 bars

Ingredients

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup creamy peanut butter
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup packed light brown sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

Instructions

Preheat the oven. Heat oven to 350—F. Line a 9x13-inch baking pan with parchment paper, leaving an overhang on two sides for easy removal. Lightly grease the parchment.
Cream the butter and sugars. In a large bowl, beat the softened butter, peanut butter, granulated sugar, and brown sugar together until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Stir in the vanilla.
Combine the dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, oats, baking soda, and salt.
Mix the dough. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, stirring until just combined. Fold in the chocolate chips.
Press into the pan. Transfer the dough to the prepared pan and press it into an even layer. The dough will be thick and sticky—dampen your hands slightly to make this easier.
Bake. Bake for 22 to 25 minutes, until the edges are golden brown and the center is just set. The bars will firm up as they cool, so do not overbake.
Cool and cut. Let the bars cool completely in the pan on a wire rack, at least 1 hour. Use the parchment overhang to lift them out, then cut into 24 bars.

Nutrition (per serving)

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Bars — The Kind of Thing You Make When You’re Getting Ready for Everything to Change