Oatmeal Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Bars

Valentine's Day week. A holiday I've largely ignored for the past five years, not from bitterness but from indifference — I haven't been in a relationship since a brief, half-hearted thing in junior year of college, and the holiday's aggressive coupledom doesn't bother me so much as bypass me entirely. I don't feel lonely on Valentine's Day. I feel lonely on regular Tuesdays, when the condo is quiet and the takeout (which I rarely order anymore, but still occasionally do) arrives and there's nobody to share it with. The holiday loneliness is performative; the Tuesday loneliness is real.

This week I decided to make something romantic — not for a partner but for myself. Tteok, Korean rice cakes, but this time the sweet kind: injeolmi, soft rice cakes coated in roasted soybean powder. The process is similar to what I did before — steam the glutinous rice flour dough, knead it until smooth — but the finishing is different: you roll pieces of the dough in konggomul (roasted soybean flour), which coats each piece in a nutty, slightly sweet, pale yellow dust. The finished injeolmi are soft, chewy, subtly sweet, and the soybean powder is addictive — I ate a dozen in one sitting, fingers covered in yellow powder, sitting on my couch on Valentine's evening, watching a Korean drama (I've started watching Korean dramas with subtitles, not for romance but for language exposure), and the evening was lovely. Self-contained. Complete. A woman feeding herself something sweet she made with her own hands on a holiday about love. That counts. That's love too.

Korean class on Saturday was about reading comprehension — Hyunjung gave us a short passage about a family preparing for Seollal (Korean Lunar New Year), and we worked through it together, decoding vocabulary, puzzling over grammar. The passage described a grandmother making tteokguk for her grandchildren, and I read the sentence about the grandmother's hands — how they moved quickly, surely, without measuring — and felt the familiar ache. Hands. It always comes back to hands. The grandmother's hands in the passage. The halmeoni's hands at the restaurant. Maangchi's hands on YouTube. My birth mother's hands, which I've never seen but which I imagine, constantly, small and quick and sure, making food I'm teaching myself to make. The hands are the connection. The hands are the bridge. When I make kimchi, my hands are doing what her hands might be doing, eleven thousand miles away, and the simultaneity of that — even imagined — is the closest thing to physical connection that I have with a woman I've never met.

In therapy, Dr. Yoon asked a question that stopped me: "Do you think about finding her?" Her being my birth mother. I said, "I think about her every time I cook." Dr. Yoon said, "That's not the same as thinking about finding her." She's right. Thinking about someone is passive. Finding them is active. I think about my birth mother the way I think about Korea — as a concept, an imagination, a flavor in a dish. Finding her would make her real. Real is terrifying. Real means she might not match the imagined version. Real means she might be dead. Real means she might not want to be found. Real means I might knock on a door in Busan and no one answers. Dr. Yoon said, "You don't have to find her yet. But I want you to know the difference between thinking about her and looking for her." I know the difference. I'm not ready to cross it. But I know it's there, like a line on the floor that I'll eventually have to step over or consciously decide not to.

I brought injeolmi to Bellevue on Saturday afternoon. Karen tried one and her face lit up — the texture, the soybean powder, the gentle sweetness. She said, "These are like mochi!" (They're not mochi. But they're in the neighborhood.) David ate three, which for David and sweet things is practically binge eating. Kevin FaceTimed and I held up an injeolmi to the camera and he said, "Mail me some." I said, "They don't mail well." He said, "Then I'll come get them." He hasn't come to Seattle since Christmas. But the offer — genuine, casual, motivated by rice cakes — made me happy. The food is drawing people in. The food is doing what food does: creating reasons to gather, to share, to connect. My Korean food, made in my Capitol Hill kitchen, is creating connections that didn't exist a year ago. That's not a hobby. That's a life.

The injeolmi I made that Valentine’s evening reminded me of something I’ve come to believe more and more: the act of making something sweet with your own hands, just for yourself, is its own complete gesture of love. When I don’t have glutinous rice flour on hand—or when I want something with that same chewy, yielding texture but a little more familiar—I turn to these oatmeal peanut butter chocolate chip bars, which I press into the pan with my palms and cut into pieces I’ll eat off a plate on my couch. They don’t carry the weight of a grandmother’s recipe or a mother’s hands, but they are made by mine, and on a Tuesday evening when the condo is quiet, that is more than enough.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 22 minutes | Total Time: 32 minutes | Servings: 16 bars

Ingredients

2 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon fine salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled
1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips, divided

Instructions

Preheat. Heat your oven to 350°F (175°C). Line a 9x13-inch baking pan with parchment paper, leaving an overhang on two sides for easy lifting.
Mix dry ingredients. In a medium bowl, whisk together the rolled oats, flour, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
Combine wet ingredients. In a large bowl, whisk together the melted butter, peanut butter, brown sugar, and granulated sugar until smooth and well combined. Add the eggs one at a time, whisking after each addition, then stir in the vanilla extract.
Bring it together. Add the dry ingredient mixture to the wet ingredients and stir with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula until just combined. Fold in 3/4 cup of the chocolate chips, reserving the rest for the top.
Press and top. Transfer the batter into the prepared pan. Using your palms and fingertips, press it into an even layer all the way to the edges. Scatter the remaining chocolate chips evenly over the surface and press them lightly into the top.
Bake. Bake for 20–22 minutes, until the edges are golden and the center is just set—it will firm up as it cools, so don’t overbake. The top should look slightly underdone.
Cool and cut. Let the bars cool in the pan on a wire rack for at least 20 minutes before lifting out with the parchment and cutting into 16 squares. For cleaner cuts, cool fully before slicing.

Nutrition (per serving)

Oatmeal Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Bars — Sweet Things Made by Hand