Four Batches of Homemade Granola Down, And the Recipe for You, Finally

So, I owe several people the recipe for homemade granola . . . and have been negligent in keeping garden posts up this spring . . . so to hop back into the ol' blog I will start there.

First I have to say that I discovered the basic recipe when served by Rhonda Stone, Pasadena City Council member Haderlein's Field Rep. She used a version of the Barefoot Contessa Recipe, which I dutifully looked up, and massively modified. (If you want to see the original, with some commentary, try here, at The Cookbook Critic. )

Moontree Granola

4 cups (apx 1 lb or 450 g) organic** Rolled Oats

2 cups slivered dry-toasted almonds

1/2 cup honey

3/4 cup good olive oil

2 cups toasted unsalted cashew pieces (whole cashews are more expensive, and need to be chopped a little; but even salted whole cashews can work)

2 cups raisins

1 cup dried cranberries

• Mix dry oats and almonds together in a large bowl; be sure there is room to stir the mixture after adding oil and honey.



• Mix the honey and olive oil with a hand or stand mixer on low, or light whisk. The goal is to evenly distribute the honey and oil so that it will evenly coat the oats.



• Pour a portion of the honey-oil over the oats and stir it in. Add some more honey-oil mixture and stir, to coat the oats and almonds. Continue adding honey-oil and stirring until (a) all the mixture is in and (b) all the oats have been coated. This may require some stirring well after all the honey-oil is added.
  

NEXT:

Cover a baking sheet (with edges) with parchment paper, or be prepared to scrub after baking. Spoon the oat mixture on the parchment and spread evenly.

Preheat oven to 350 F. Place sheet on middle rack, and bake for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes check cereal color and stir on the sheet. Cereal should be just tan. The final bake time will be between 20 and 30 minutes longer, but check the cereal every 10, then every 5 minutes.

Once the cereal starts browning it can go from lightly brown, to nut brown, to burnt in a few seconds. When the cereal is a light brown remove the cookie sheet from the oven. If the cereal cools on the sheet, it will continue to brown. If the cereal is already brown enough, slide the parchment off the tray and onto a heat-proof surface.

Let the cereal cool until cold, crumble into a bowl. And the cashews add dried fruits, mixing well. Store in sealed kitchen or Mason jars; makes about 3 quarts by volume with these add-ins.

Variations

Nuts: Substitute any nuts that you like, or leave them out entirely. Dry nuts (such as dry- roasted almonds) can go in with the oats, and are great with the honey-oil mixture. Oily nuts, such as cashews, peanuts, or similar, should go in with the dried fruit and not be heated. If nuts are omitted from the oats, reduce the oil slightly, by about a 1/8 to 1/4 cup.

Dried Fruits: Any dried fruits will work. I have used home grown dried apples and figs; my wife prefers no nuts and a mixture of Trader Joe's Raisins and "Golden Berry Blend"

Other Stuff: Leslie also likes to sprinkle ground flax meal on the spread out oats before baking (1/8 to 1/4 cup). Adds some good omega-3's and fiber, and a little nutty flavor. To turn it into candy, add a few chocolate chips. Really, the issues is to add what you like!

Eating: Great as a filling snack (a handful in a wax paper bag goes a long way) or as traditional cereal with milk. Or with vanilla or maple yogurt. Greek style yogurt is interesting too, and you can add fresh fruit for a change from time to time.

** All ingredients are organic or otherwise cleaner versions where feasible. The organic oats are easily available at Wholefoods at modest prices; the other ingredients all come from Trader Joe's, of course.

We "Tie One On" Without the Master Craftsman Nearby, and It Comes Out Okay.

Been working on a new skill for the last several weeks. Back in September, took a broom tying class from Little John, arranged by the folks at Adams Forge. Didn't quite finish the broom we made in class, and needed to find the materials to sew it down. Which proved a but of an odyssey, but worth it in the end.


Tried making a broom needle out of various objects, but none did the trick. Finally orderd a flat steel "needle" that worked really well. Except that it had very sharp edges and a very sharp point and it had a tendency to cut the sewing thread. But what are a blacksmith's tools for if not making and fixing other tools. (Grin.)

So: filed off the edges and rounded off the point of the "needle" a bit, and it worked great. Used some heavy black hemp line from Michaels' for sewing down my first "class" broom ($1.50) and it worked great too. Trimmed the corn ends with heavy snips, and the first broom was done.

It was really fun to do, and the end product looked great, even if it was a mediocre outcome. So I figured I wanted to do it again. But one thing I had learned was that the proper equipment makes a big difference.

So, the first thing I needed was broom corn. Ten pound box from from an online store: arrived well before Christmas. Buying broom corn was far easier than you'd expect. Turned out buying the right twine was another matter.

The sewing line wouldn't work: Not really strong enough to support the needed tension. Couldn't find anything very workable or attractive in several local stores, but thankfully Little John made free with the name of his secret only-from-Mexico-in-10-mile-spools brand of nylon net-making twine. Now it isn't supposed to be available easily -- but one quick Google, and there it was, in 200 yard, $6.00 spools! That arrived just after Christmas.

Unfortunately, to properly tie a broom you need to pull on the string pretty hard while turning the handle -- which requires a "tying wheel."

This is basically a big spool that you can step on to hold down the roll of twine while you pull sharply. I had some ideas on how to make it, then I noticed that I had some barrel staves and a table saw . . . After a couple of false starts, I cobbled up this tying wheel: Solid oak, and it smells like wine. (Grin.)

So now I needed a handle.

We have some large branches of apple wood and also of holly, so I cut off a nice curved section of holly branch, sanded it down to near white (a little mottling for visual interest) and off we went.

Since I had a pile of undifferentiated broom corn I spent an hour sorting it into four piles: Small, medium and really long -- plus broken bits. It took a little while to do as I started out with "long" and "short" and discovered that the straw came in three distinct lengths, not two, so had to restart at one point.

After a while Hannah came out to help, and we made her a quickie "flying broom" out of a stick in the backyard and the broken broom corn bits. Turned out nicer than I expected, and proved that the tying wheel worked.

So, long story short, I finished the broom I started at home from scratch. It has some serious flaws in execution, most of which are not visible. I did leave off the second layer of straw, and so had to undo one whole layer, add the middle layer in where it belonged, and then redo the top layer -- but it made a big difference in the fullness of the broom.

At the end, I clamped the broom in the post-leg vise between two more barrel staves to sew it. Came out pretty ok, given all the oopses and redos.

Oh, and naturally I saved some of the seeds that fell of the broom corn and we will have to see what we can do with that this spring.

The Holly-Handled First Solo Broom

Cider, Woodsmoke, Soap Bubbles, Beef, Barley & Guiness Give the Illusion of Fall in SoCal

A deep bed of white-orange hardwood coals throws its heat six, maybe seven or eight feet, warming my waterlogged and cold fingers despite my distance from the fire.

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Darkness has arrived, and is impatiently settling into full night, despite the parting comments of the sun written in the bright blue glow of the twilight sky. There is just enough light left to finish cleaning the cider press without resorting to the jarring eye-noise of the backyard floodlights. The last pressing bag is hung to dry.

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Two fresh logs on the fire flair with surprise as they settle onto the coal bed, then transform themselves into the hot, steady flame befitting the tree from whence they came. Cider is in the kitchen; homemade Beef, Barley & Guinness stew is simmering; fresh cider-bread is in the oven. Fresh coffee is on the table and I have a few minutes to make some notes and observations on the ol' electronic kitchen calender here.

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Another Round of Fall

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At the more northerly latitudes of Europe from whence we Americans borrow our seasons, it is winter. Late August through about Halloween are the transitional time, and the traditional start of winter in November can be quite bitter. Around here, if we have nights in the 40s and days in the low 70s we consider that winter has truly begun. (Ah Southern California!) Overnight we had our second lowest temp since last spring -- a mere 42F or so -- and a high not much out of the 60s. We almost had rain; a few places had a cloudburst on Friday, but here we got nothing but some pretty clouds scudding around on a brisk breeze. This is the second patch of "fall" that we have had this year -- after the last patch we had a week of temps in the 90s. Sigh.

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Oak Glen Apples

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Made the annual pilgrimage to Oak Glenn for cider apples last weekend. Didn't buy as much as we usually do -- maybe only half to two-thirds. No particular reason. Feelin' thrifty I guess. The Snow-Line cider seconds look quite nice this year -- very little in the way of rots, moths, etc. (Some years there is more carving done on the apples than not. Today in a bushel I had maybe two cups of parings -- and most of those precautionary. )

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The mix appears to be Gala, Fuji, Granny Smith, Pippen, Rome, a couple of Honeycrisps, a few Winesaps, the odd small Arkansas Black, a couple of the cloyingly-sweet Golden Delicious and one lone Red Delicious in that first box. Made a sweet but not too sweet mix over all. Nearly two gallons out of the bushel, wish is good.

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Hannah and I pressed up one box this evening -- just to get some cider for dinner. And breakfast. And midnight snack tonight. (Grin). Nothing quite like cold cider with apple-wood smoked bacon, and some really fresh eggs, fried potatoes with HGO garlic, onions and peppers.

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"Dinner is almost ready," Hannah tells me, singing a song about cider she invents on the spot as she blows her soap bubbles. The hot smoke from the fire carries the bubbles high into the sky, and we laugh.

Moontree Glows on a Soft Summer Night

Summer School ended yesterday, and only a few weeks remain of the summer; one of those weeks is given over to teacher training, but still and all this is the best part of the year.

On this, *my* first day of summer, the tall ladder is up to trim up the "moontree" -- a drooping acacia with bright yellow flowers this time of year and two-foot long rock-hard been pods that drop onto the wooden deck with a suprising "BANG,clatter clatter" later.

We call it the moontree because it holds the odd shopping-mall-sized spherical light fixture my grandfather retrieved when cleaning up after tenants renting my Great-Grandmother's house years ago.

For a couple of decades at least it hung in the ornamental pear tree outside my grandparents' kitchen and office windows in Pasadena, just at eye level. Lit inside by a single, naked 60 Watt lightbulb, it looked for all the world like a pale full-moon dragged to earth and wedged under the tree canopy. The warm, diffuse light it shed on the iron bench and damp green space below it gave the yard an aura of magic that always suprised me.

My startlement stemmed in part from the fact that my Grandfather was the sort of utilitarian and practical fellow who would (and did) take a saw to an old tiger-maple rolltop desk to remove the roll top and replace it with a sheet of painted plywood, the better to read building plans and blueprints in his trade as a building contactor.

I was at first puzzled and then amused by his frequent derisive comments about the tenants who had been crazy enough to mount it on the 10 foot cieling of their living room. He frequently called it "a piece of old junk" and his regular, nonchalant explaination for its continued presence in the tree decades after he found it was that he put it there to get it out of the way one day and forgot about it.

When Grandfather passed away (Grandmother had gone a little before) and the house was sold, dire rumblings about how to get rid of the moon fixture were heard; aghast I rescued it from oblivion, and when my wife and I moved into our house (also in Pasadena) it quickly took pride of place in our own tree.

(Turns out, by the way, the thing was hardly just "hung there," but carefuly mounted on a 3/8th inch bolt so as to withstand the strongest winds yet leave room for the tree to grow. Wonder how that happened?)

Now, our backyard -- and our tree -- abut a street with relatively heavy foot traffic (and not a few cars). And we often hear comments by people walking by, or are asked about the tree by our students at school, marveling at the "moon." We like it, and its diffuse light sets our yard aglow in the evenings without the harshness of other lights. And we have sort of adopted it as a logo for our homemade and homegrown products.

Although Grandfather Blumer had a decided utilitarian bent, and appeared not to have much in the way of poetry in his soul on first acquiantance, I often like to think of the first Moontree as "Jack's Folly" and proof that everyone can appreciate a little magic now and then.