Good Real Food

My friend Emily brought some insanely good homemade granola on a Capoeira retreat recently. She got the recipe from Nekisia Davis via Martha Stewart, I think. I never used to like granola much, but Noah likes it and all good cereal is stupid expensive so we eat it. It helped that both Prana and Sahadi’s carried it in bulk. Prana is gone and Sahadi’s never has it anymore, so we’ve been trying brands for years now. I’m always reading labels trying to make sense of the sugar content, which can vary wildly, as can prices. And quality. For a while I was grinding brown rice and toasting wheat germ and sunflower seeds to put on yogurt. My mom had a great granola recipe, but when I tried it it came out awful. Not crunchy at all and it was a big pain in the butt to keep turning it and have the oven on. All of which is my way of saying that I’m trying again. Oats are so astoundingly cheap and granola is mostly oats, dag nabbit. My big breakthrough was to cook a batch in an iron skillet. No oven needed and it toasts a lot faster.

You need roughly 3 cups of oats and a total of 4 cups of things like wheat germ, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, shredded coconut, chopped almonds/pecans/walnuts. Needless to say, you want raw nuts here. The original recipe says to stir together with 1/2 cup olive oil, 3/4 cup maple syrup, 1/2 cup brown sugar and a pinch of coarse salt and bake 45 minutes in a 300º oven, turning every ten minutes. What I did was stir it all up with some brown sugar (less than half a cup, for sure) and then scoop some of it into the skillet and pour in a bit of oil and a bit of maple syrup. I just kept turning it while I was doing other things, until it was all nice and toasty. I’m finding that the wheat germ (my addition to the recipe) starts to burn before the rest is toasted so I might rethink my wheat germ strategy.

I’ve been keeping the bowl of mixed nuts, grains and sugar in the fridge and toasting it in small batches, dialing down the maple syrup and oil every time. It isn’t as delicious without tons of syrup (surprise!) but it is a little more wholesome. I’m making breakfast here, not dessert. I think I’m also going to try mixing up the oils to see if I can’t get it crispier. There’s definitely a cult of olive oil granola out there, but olive oil has a lower smoke point than other vegetable oils and I’m used to other frying projects coming out crispier in canola or safflower oil. Wouldn’t that also apply to toasting? A few people have suggested coconut oil, but … saturated fat? No thanks.

Either way, when it is done, you can add some dried fruit. Emily put blueberries in and they were amazing.

Decadent Snack Variation

The batch that Emily brought to Ananda was so insanely good that I had to try to make some before we could get our hand on any oats. I used 2c of wheat germ and 3c of various nuts and seeds, skipped the brown sugar and stirred it up with 1/2c olive oil and 1/2c maple syrup. The recipe called for 1 tsp of rock salt plus more to taste. I toasted it on the stovetop and added kosher salt when it was mostly done. By the handful, this was amazing. Maybe too amazing. I ate it all in two days without much help: not ideal. When I tried it with milk, the salt dissolved and was a little gross, truth be told. For snacking? Awesome. For breakfast? Skip the rock salt.

Next Round of Experimentation

I might also play around with adding applesauce or, um, applesauce.

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