Greener Living Through Granola?

READING MICHAEL POLLAN’S The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which argues convincingly for eating food grown and produced locally, while simultaneously trying to pare down your family’s food budget, is a frustrating (to say the least) endeavor. Such has been my lot of late.

I finally got around to reading Pollan’s engaging treatise on the paradoxes (and horrors) of modern eating in America just last week, after having it on my nightstand for, oh, three years. (I have excuses, but really, why bother? At least I’m reading it now.) Diving back into the book coincided with my wrestling down a challenge I’ve posed to myself for the last couple of years: What small change can I make in our family’s lifestyle this year to both make us more environmentally responsible? (Saving money is a secondary, but equally important goal.)

Last year, I stopped buying paper napkins. We went cold turkey, switching to cloth napkins exclusively, and it’s been painless. Honest. The year before, I cut way back on our consumption of plastic bags. These are tiny changes, true, but those are often the easiest ones to make for good. This year, I decided I wanted to stop buying so much sandwich bread. At $3.99 per loaf, it’s expensive, and often goes moldy in the breadbox before we use it up. Plus–homemade is better. (Duh.)

Since Christmas, once or twice a week I’ve been making two loaves of the semi-famous No Knead Bread invented by NYC baker Jim Lahey, and it never goes to waste, costs half the price of “store” bread, and is no doubt healthier, since it only has four ingredients (flour, water, yeast and salt).

The ease of the bread project got me to thinking about other commodities I could make myself without too much time invested. (Yes, that’s the key. That bread takes about 10 minutes of active time to produce. Seriously. Try it.) Breakfast in our house is always a battle, but almost all of us (save the River, who’s got outlier breakfast tastes) love granola. The one kind we all like is locally made, true, but it costs a fortune. There had to be a better way, especially since oats, even organic ones, only cost $1.50 a pound.

Thanks to two incredible food bloggers, Alana, of Eating From the Ground Up, and Heidi, of 101 Cookbooks, I came up with this recipe. (Heidi’s recipe, sadly, is not online; it appears in her beautiful book Super Natural Cooking.) This granola, if I do say so myself, is completely addictive, dead simple, and a great way to use up nutty/fruity/seedy odds and ends cluttering up the pantry. Did I mention it’s addictive?

Top o’ the morning to you.

Simply Great Granola (inspired by recipes created by Heidi and Alana)

6 cups rolled oats
1 cup shredded coconut (unsweetened)
1 cup slivered almonds
1 cup raw sunflower seeds
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 cup coconut oil, melted (a neutral oil like canola or grapeseed will work fine, but I like the flavor of the coconut oil)
1/2 cup maple syrup (I like the darker grade B kind)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon almond extract

Preheat oven to 250 F. Line two baking sheets with parchment.

In your largest bowl, combine dry ingredients. Combine wet ingredients and stir very thoroughly to mix well. Pour the wet ingredients over the dry and stir until all the dry ingredients are moistened. Divide the mixture between the two sheets and spread out into an even layer about 1/2 inch thick.

Put the pans into the top third of the preheated oven. Bake for 30 minutes, and then switch the positions of the pans, since most ovens heat unevenly. Bake for another 30 minutes, and rotate again, and then bake for a final 30 minutes. Turn the oven off, and leave the granola in the oven to cool down slowly. Crumble into an airtight container to store.

Blogger Alana says this will keep 2-3 weeks, but I can’t believe it would ever last that long.

Notes: I like all sweets to have a bit of salt, too; I think it radically enhances sweet flavors. If you really disagree, I won’t quite understand, but of course you can omit the salt. And none of the inclusions, save, I suppose, the oats, are written in stone. Use walnuts instead of almonds, as I have before. Delicious. Sesame seeds are good, and I sometimes add a bit of freshly ground flaxseed (after cooking) if I have it on hand.

You could use more vanilla, as Alana does, but I like this aromatic hint just fine. More maple syrup will make it sweeter…you get the idea. Alana says, I think rightly, that dried fruit should be added to granola as it’s served; toasting doesn’t do much for already-dried raisins. However…I have made this twice with goji berries, which I bought on healthful impulse at the  market only to discover that I don’t much care for them in their original dried state. They are the exception which proves the rule about toasting dried fruit: if added to the dry ingredients and toasted, their sugars seem to caramelize and they mellow and sweeten into something quite delicious. My kids still think they’re repulsive, but I’m happy that we’ve used them up rather than consigning them to the compost pile.

Special thanks to Alana of Eating From the Ground Up for the image of granola goodness up above. Yours will look just as sublime, I promise!

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