Fast Food

It’s not so easy to eat healthily when you’re out on the road, there are so many things to tempt you when you stop for fuel – mega-size hot sausage rolls, double packs of Mars bars, iced buns, the list goes on… So in an attempt to keep us more or less on the straight and narrow, I make my reasonably healthy flapjacks – reasonably healthy because, instead of using butter, I use olive spread and before you say ugh, there’s very little difference in taste but you have a nice smug feeling that you’re not taking on so much cholesterol! So here goes with my recipe for flapjacks.

Using a large saucepan, gently melt 150g of olive spread (Bertolli or supermarket own-brand), 150g of Demerara sugar and one large tablespoon of golden syrup. Once melted mix well and add 275g of coarse porage oats (I use Scott’s Old-Fashioned Porage Oats) and stir to combine. At this stage I throw in a good quantity of dried cranberries but you can leave the mixture as it is or add nuts, glace cherries or your own preferred dried fruit. Having given the flapjack mixture a final stir, tip it into a baking tin – my 22x22cms non-stick tray-bake tin is ideal – and press the oat mixture evenly across the base of the tin using the back of a metal spoon. Bake in a pre-heated oven (190C / 375F / Gas Mark 5) for 25 minutes. After the 25 minutes I turn the oven off and leave the tin of flapjack in the oven for a further 25 minutes to dry out a little. Once removed from the oven, score into pieces to suit your appetite (!) and allow to cool completely before removing from the tin.