Easy Healthy Granola Bars

"This recipe is simple, healthy, budget friendly, and endlessly customizable. Crunchy toasty goodness on the outside, chewy fruity niceness inside. What more could you want! Basically you take three ingredients: condensed milk, rolled oats and shredded coconut, mix it together with whatever fruit and nuts you like, and bingo bango.. granola bars. Perfect to take to work or school. They are so much better than store bought, which I find always have too much sugar and not enough fibre and protein. With this recipe you can pack in all the good fibretastic fruits and proteiny nuts you like, and none you don't. ** Because of the sweetness of the condensed milk, there's no need to dump a whole lot of extra sugar in. If you'd like you can replace the sweetened condensed milk with regular, unsweetened condensed milk and they come out very nice. If you want to amp up the sweeteness a bit, you can stir in a couple of tablespoons of honey or sweetener into the condensed milk when you warm it up.** When I make these granola bars I usually grab just what I need from the bulk section of the grocery store, and even with expensive add-ins like dried cherries it rarely costs over $10, which comes out to about 0.60 cents a bar. Not too shabby. I cut and wrap each bar individually in saran wrap, and freeze for up to 6 months. I pull one out in the morning and by the time lunch rolls around its defrosted and ready for munching. If you're the kind of person who likes some chocolate in their granola bars, throw in some chocolate chips, or melt some nice dark chocolate with a tsp of oil and dip or drizzle it all over the bars. Let cool until the chocolate is hard, and wrap! Healthy Granola Bars Yield:  12 bars Time: 15 mins. prep, 1 hour bake Cost: <$10 or approx. 0.60 cents per bar Hardware: - medium sized pot - baking sheet - parchment paper - wooden spoon - 8x8 inch square cake pan, greased and lined with parchment paper Software: - 1 can sweetened condensed milk - 2 cups rolled oats (not quick oats) - 1 tsp salt - 1 cup shredded unsweetened coconut - 1 cup nuts - 1 cup dried fruit Optional: 1 cup chopped chocolate 1 tsp oil Combine + melt for dipping or drizzling over bars. Instructions: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spread out oats and nuts (but not the fruit!) on a cookie sheet. Toast in the oven for about 10 minutes, stirring often to avoid burning the oats around the edges. As soon as it's turning a bit brown and you can smell the toasty nuts, it's done. Set aside. In a saucepan, heat the condensed milk until the consistency is runny. Add in any spices + salt. Add all of the dry ingredients and stir to thoroughly mix and evenly distribute all ingredients. Pour the mixture into a 8x8 inch parchment lined baking pan and and flatten with a spatula or the back of a spoon. Bake for about an hour @ 300  degrees until the mixture looks dry and is not sticky to the touch. It should be just barely starting to brown...."