Crunchy Granola

Ah, university days.

Or, for me, it was high school days, and possibly elementary school days.

My name is Tadmack, and I’m a cereal-a-holic.

And isn’t knowing half the battle?

I always thought that admitting it was the other half, but we all work on our sobriety cereal issues in different ways, right? Let’s all be generous here. This is a safe place.

Every food blogger has those low moments, don’t they, when trying to create another picturesque meal just isn’t in the cards? When they have ten thousand pages to read and write up before May, or suddenly the end of January is looming, and they’ve blown past all of their self-made deadlines, and a real one is approaching at a fast clip? Things are busy. The laundry is piling up, and it’s a choice between clean socks or a perfectly photographed meal. The smart money is on doing laundry with a bowl of cereal cradled in your lap while you turn pages in your book, with the dryer chugging along in the background. Cereal is the king queen president of foods, especially when you’re busy.

But, not just any cereal. Not that sugar-frosted crap that cuts up your gums. Let’s be realistic. This is a food blog, and anything with the word “captain” or “count” in it doesn’t count as such.

Now, any cereal-a-holic knows that The Really Good Stuff is expensive. Anything that contains actual fruit or more than one kind of grain, anything that goes by the fancy Swiss moniker of “muesli” is going to cost you. But before you dig out all the change in your couch and blow your stash on something pricey, think about this: You could just make your own. Museli — which is untoasted and uncoated — or granola, which is coated with melted sugar and is toasted — either way, making your own excellent meal-in-a-minute is really simple. You already know what The Good Stuff has got in it, right?

Pretty Decent Granola (Base)

(Adapted from a recipe courtesy of Alton Brown)

• 3 cups rolled oats
• 1 cup roughly chopped almonds
• 3/4 cup flax seeds
• 1/4 cup shredded sweet coconut
• 1/4 cup dark brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons coconut milk or water
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup raisins
• 1/2 cup dried apricots, chopped



• 1/2 c. cranberries, dried
• 1/2 c. dried pineapple, blueberries, or anything else you think goes

Basic directions, feel free to disregard

1. Preheat oven to 250 degrees F.
2. In a large bowl, combine the oats, nuts, flax, coconut, and brown sugar.

   In a separate bowl, combine maple syrup, oil, and salt. Combine both mixtures and pour onto 2 sheet pans, or else bake in separate batches. Do not make the mistake of thinking that shoving it all into one pan will work. A word to the wise, here. Cook for 45 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes or so to achieve an even color.

3. During the last fifteen minutes, you can add your dried apricot to this mixture if it’s particularly sticky, but otherwise, don’t add any of your fruit. You know what burnt raisins taste like? I do. You’d think I could actually pay attention and think things through before just dumping everything into a pan, but the call of the cereal is hard to resist… sigh
4. Remove from oven and transfer into a large bowl. Add raisins and mix until evenly distributed.

Now you can safely go back to trying frantically to finish whatever it is you procrastinated on so badly that you had to eat cereal for dinner. You’ll find that muesli is even easier to make, as it doesn’t involve any of those pesky toasting options, and you can just leave your options open to add sugar to individual servings or not. (I’d skip the maple syrup, oil and salt altogether, however.)

Making your own granola is so very much less expensive than buying it at the store, you’ll wonder why you don’t do it all the time.

And then you’ll look down at your procrastinated on projects, and you’ll know the answer.

*sigh

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