I would gladly post a great dinner recipe today, except for one small problem: I apparently forgot how to cook. Okay, maybe not really, but we've had our fair share of dining out, salad-for-dinner, and "fend for yourself" evenings around here lately. Maybe it is the hectic spring schedules, or the fact that I've been doing some freelance gigs, or maybe it is just the fact that Yummies (our favorite downtown ice cream store) opened and I want to eat downtown because that always means a trip to Yummies for dessert.
I will, however, post a recipe for my husband's favorite granola. Because that means I actually have to make the granola, which will in turn make my husband (who is still looking at me cross-eyed from this post) very, very happy. I modified Catherine Newman's original recipe to appease the picky eaters in my house. And appease them it did, because this stuff goes like, well, like fresh granola around here, which is to say it lasts two days, at best.
Without further ado...
Watcha need:
six cups of rolled oats. Why, exactly do they call them "rolled?" far as I can see, they are flat as pancakes, but whatever. You can get these awfully cheap if you buy in bulk (and by "cheap" I am referring to local co-op pricing, not blue-light special inexpensive. food bills are a bear to look at, aren't they?)
one and a half cups of chopped nuts. We go the almond route. I once bought cashews, by mistake, but chickened out before chopping 'em up, more because I hate the word cashew than anything else. You can use whatever nuts you want though, just make sure you chop 'em.
1/4 cup each of the following:
raw pumpkin seeds (that's the green seeds in the mess of bags above. Did you know pumpkin seeds dry green?)
wheat germ (which is not pretty enough to warrant a photo. sorry).
whole flax seeds
ground flax seeds (you can grind flax seeds in a coffee bean grinder, or buy them pre-ground. Or if you are really fancy, you already own a flax seed grinder, all on its own).
sunflower seeds
a generous 1/2 cup of brown sugar
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 stick salted butter (I'm sure unsalted would be fine too. It is just that unsalted anything in my house is unholy). I guess I got camera-lazy for awhile, or had to stop the kids from sneezing into the rolled oats. My apologies for the lack of visuals.
1/3 cup Agave Nectar (you can use honey too)
1 1/4 teaspoon vanilla-- NOT the imitation kind either. (whoa. I was a bit strong there. Sorry. I love my vanilla...also, I love this box, because it says "A gluten free food" and that makes me giggle-- I mean, hello-- it's vanilla).
An oven, pre-heated to 300-degrees.
Get a big bowl and dump all the dry ingredients in together. Mix well-- if your kids are helping, make sure you check to see if they really washed their hands and scrubbed out the dirt from their fingernails...or just notice it too late, and hope no other adults get a big wad of backyard in their bite.
Melt the butter in a small sauce pan and stir in the agave, then add the vanilla. Whisk together and pour into the dry ingredients, mixing until everything has been gooped up well.
Oh, and if you have little helpers, please make sure you teach them how to hold the bowl with one hand, and stir with the other. Otherwise, your floor may look like this:
Now spread the (remaining, ahem)granola on a baking sheet-- you'll have to do this in batches unless you have two really big jelly roll pans-- and bake for 15 minutes.
Take it out of the oven and stir with a spatula. Put it back in the over and bake another 10 minutes. And come back to Cluck and Tweet and look this picture of Lizzie,
falling in love with the vanilla, butter, and agave combination. Because I could definitely waste 10 minutes fawning over her adorableness.
Take the pan out and stir it all again. At this point, you might want to start doing this to the tune of the "Hokey Pokey" and when you put the granola back in the oven for its last 10 minutes, you can sing "That's what its all about, toot-toot!"
After 35 minutes of total bake time, the granola should be browning and done looking, if not, just stick it back in and watch it carefully for the next few minutes. Pull it out and let it cool before devouring, and store whatever is left in an airtight container. I usually can fill four mason jars per batch.
And of course you can add all sorts of coconut or dried fruits to this basic mix. We just don't do that around here. Our granola prefers a little yogurt and some fresh berries. Okay-- sorry-- that sounded about as snobby as I meant it to sound, but what it really boils down to is that everyone in my house detests dried fruit, minus Lizzie, but she's been known to eat rabbit turd.
--K
