guest blogger (mama, of course): another recipe for granola freaks with aarp cards

Homemade granola: why bother? Of course, at this point in my life, that’s my reaction to the idea of any homemade food. I’m officially done with cooking. But thirty years ago I was the cookingest girl in the feminist book group, the bakingest mom in the La Leche League. I had a baby food grinder and an electric yogurt maker. I grew sprouts in my kitchen window. No kidding.

And once in a while, even now, I get the urge to open the door of one of my ovens (I have three – which is a lot of ovens for somebody who doesn’t cook any more), pull out all the pots and pans I store in there, and see if it still works. I’m especially prone to that impulse when the weather turns cool and crisp and the only available outdoor activity is raking. Just because I’m over cooking doesn’t mean I’m into manual labor.

Which is how I ended up last weekend making six pounds of granola and five loaves of dense hippie-style multi-grain high protein bread while Clare’s daddy filled a 4’ x 10’ compost bin with shredded leaves.

Both of those recipes date from those halcyon days of yore when medical science told us that vegetarians had to eat complementary amino acids at each meal or risk kwashiorkor. So your granola had almonds and grains and nonfat dry milk and coconut and lots of oil and honey. And your bread had sunflower seeds and wheat germ and rice flour and cornmeal and soy flour and you slathered it with gobs of cream cheese and jam. And your burrito had beans and brown rice and a sky high pile of shredded cheddar. And your dessert had carob and wheat germ and almonds and butter and brown sugar with whipped cream on top. Because that was healthy eating.
Maybe I’ll write down the hippie bread recipe some day. It’s really good, if you don’t mind the fact that a paper-thin slice has the heft and texture of a roofing shingle and counts as three Weight Watchers points. We weren’t on Weight Watchers back then. We were on the Scarsdale diet or drinking Metrecal.

This is definitely the grooviest granola you ever finished a pound of when you were high and got the munchies. At least, that’s what people said at the time, through the haze, as they crawled around on the floor to find the rest of their clothes. Not me. I never ate more than half a cup at the most. On top of a big bowl of ice cream. While sober as a judge. SweartoGod.
The recipe’s coming soon. Two things first.

Thing one: For as long as I’ve been making this granola I told people it was from a magazine column by Julia Child. But when I looked up the recipe in my big box of magazine recipes from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and early 00s (an interesting archeological expedition, about which I’ll write some other time), the clipping doesn’t have Julia’s name anywhere on it. The headline is, “Another Recipe for Granola Freaks” and the text reads, “This one comes from Marilyn D. in San Francisco, who says it makes the best mixture she’s ever tasted, so much so that she is quite willing to ignore the cost both monetarily and calorifically.” It sounds like something Julia would say, and I swear Julia had a regular column in one of the mainstream women’s magazines back then (McCall’s? Redbook? Good Housekeeping?), but I can’t prove it from this clipping.

Thing two: The granola has morphed over the years to the point that Marilyn D. might not recognize it. I use half as much oil as the original recipe and I cut out the coconut altogether to eliminate saturated fat. Instead of a whole cup of honey, I sweeten it with apple cider and a little molasses. I add flax meal because it’s supposed to lower your cholesterol, and I leave out the salt because I have high blood pressure. So I guess that makes this

Another Recipe for Granola Freaks with AARP Cards

Ingredients

• 5 cups old fashioned rolled oats
• 1 cup sliced almonds
• 1 cup sunflower seeds
• ½ cup freshly ground flax seeds
• ½ cup wheat germ
• 1 cup Grape Nuts
• ½ cup powdered skim milk (optional if you’re vegan)
• ½ cup canola oil
• ¼ cup molasses
• 1 cup apple cider
• ½ cup dark, seedless raisins

Prep

• Throw all the dry ingredients into a huge bowl.
• Stir together the oil, molasses and cider in a separate bowl and pour over.
• Mix thoroughly.
• If you want clumps and clusters, you’ll need more oil and more molasses. My way, the granola is drier and less clumpy. You can double or triple or quadruple the recipe if you have a big enough tub to mix it in and enough pans to spread it out in for baking. And three ovens.

Actual Cooking

• Spread into a 13 x 9 inch baking pan.
• Bake at 350 degrees, about 40 to 45 minutes.
• Stir every 10 minutes, adding the raisins in the last 10 minutes of baking.
• Remove from oven; cool.
• If you want to blow your friends’ minds the next time they get the munchies, add about a cup of chocolate chips when it’s ALMOST cool. They’ll melt just a little and ramp up the deliciousness significantly.
• Store in an airtight container.

I usually mix an ounce or so of granola with some nonfat plain Greek yogurt for a total of 180 calories (140 per ounce for the granola) and lots of energy to start my day. We didn’t have Greek yogurt back when I began making this granola. Well, I guess the Greeks had it, but where I come from we didn’t. Instead, we had to take the yogurt out of the electric yogurt maker (they still make them: http://www.vmc-health.com/index2.htm ) and let it drain through a tea strainer lined with cheesecloth overnight. Because life was hard back then. Nasty, brutish, and covered in sesame tahini.

guest post: mama's world famous fried walnuts

First of all, wait for a dry, cool day. You can't do this when it's humid. And you will need a deep fryer with a thermostat. You can do small batches in one of those Fry Baby things, but you're better off with one that has a basket rather than the slotted spatula thing for scooping stuff out of the oil. Walnuts covered in molten sugar are tricky to work with. You don't want to be chasing them around with a spatula. You want to be lifting them out of the boiling oil with a nice sturdy basket. We have a big Waring deep fryer, and we use it for just three things: 1) fried walnuts, 2) smelts for Christmas Eve, and 3) Clare's faschnachts. I can't remember the last time I deep fried anything else. Even so it was worth spending $100 and having this big honkin thing sitting on my counter top in the downstairs kitchen because those three things are just that good.

For each pound of fancy whole unroasted walnut halves, you need about 1-1/3 cup of sugar and 2/3 cup of water. The amounts are approximate. You should err on the side of more syrup rather than less syrup because extra sugar will just crystallize into walnutty sugar dust that you can use the next time you make a coffee cake or cobbler. And some of it melts into burned walnutty brittle in the deep fryer that you can crush in the food processor and sprinkle on ice cream. So don't skimp. Put the walnuts and sugar and water in a bigger pot than you think you need, because you want to be able to stir them when the syrup is boiling without having it slop over the side. Also, overcrowded walnuts tend to break more and you want the walnuts to stay whole. My big spaghetti pot is big enough to do 3 lbs at a time but that's pushing it. If you want to make a total of 5 lbs of nuts, you're better off boiling up 2 batches.

Set the pot over medium high heat and stir frequently (but carefully) once it gets bubbly. Keep stirring until the syrup gets really thick and then -- suddenly! -- the bottom of the pot is dry when you scrape it with the spoon, and all the nuts are covered in sugar. They will be gritty, not candied, because the syrup doesn't get to the temperature you need for hard candy. Spread the nuts out in a single layer on a big pan. You'll need to separate them once they cool down a little. Let them cool completely but don't let them sit around too long or they'll pick up moisture. Overnight is OK if it's dry.

Fill your fryer with oil (canola, vegetable, or peanut oil all work OK) to the fill line and heat it to 375 degrees. Fill the basket to the fill line and submerge the nuts in the oil. Shake them around gently to keep them from sticking. When the walnuts start to brown and look a little shiny, pull the basket halfway out and shake VERY GENTLY to drain off as much of the oil as possible. Watch them carefully -- this only takes a couple minutes. If they're a little undercooked, they'll be gritty. If they're a little overcooked, they'll have a slightly burnt taste, which a lot of people actually prefer. If you're working with small batches, the later batches will cook faster because of the layer of burnt sugar that builds up on the bottom of the fryer.

Dump the fried walnuts onto a jelly roll pan. Don't line the pan with paper towels or anything, because they'll stick like a sumbitch. Working fast while they're still hot, push them apart with the back of a big spoon with one hand while sprinkling them with a salt shaker with the other hand. After a couple minutes, I usually transfer to walnuts to another pan so they cool faster.

Once they're cool enough to touch, I separate the stuck ones with my fingers. When the oil cools off and you pour it out into a jar to use again the next time you fry walnuts (or faschnachts, but take it from me, DO NOT use walnut/faschnacht oil for smelts, much less smelt oil for walnuts or faschnachts), don't forget to scoop out the fried sugar and drain it on paper towels (it won't stick, because it's cool by then) and crush it up to use on ice cream because it's like getting a sundae for free. That's it. Everybody really loves these. Almost everybody, anyway.