Welcome to a recipe post for paid subscribers! This granola or some variation of it is on rotation at my house on a weekly basis. Next Tuesday, all subscribers will receive a recap of the Third Coast Soif wine fair. As always, check out my past posts here and learn more about my day job here. Thanks for reading!
At this point in my recipe writing journey, I feel that nearly every piece I write somehow connects back to my grandmothers. Recently, I was talking to a colleague who asked me how long I had been interested in food. “Forever,” I said without hesitation. It started with my grandmothers, so of course it’s been as long as I’ve been able to think. I knew them from day one and they loved food. They showed their love to me by sharing their food and recipes. I felt loved by them and loved them back, and ate and cooked the food. I love food. It’s a math that at once feels profound and as simple as can be. (At least, I think there’s an A=B=C so A=C equation in there somewhere. Again, math was not my strong suit.)
We are again today, as with the recent chocolate cake recipe and with the chocolate mousse recipe and the crisp/cobbler recipe before that, diving into another one of my grandmothers’ recipes: granola.
My Mammaw was a meal prepper before meal prepping was cool. She baked enormous batches of bread, cookies, and granolas to have on hand and stored them so effectively that it felt like at her house, the food would never run out. As someone who is constantly striving to be a breakfast person (I just…am not), I started making her granola when I moved to Chicago to give myself something sweet but still nourishing to eat before work.
The longer I’ve made this recipe, the faster and looser I play it: I swap seeds, fruits, and grains faster than I do when I’m playing Pit. I make it sweeter some weeks and dry as a bone the next. It changes and adapts with me and my preferences, but the foundation remains.
Tips
Please, please, please: take this recipe as a guideline rather than a rule! Granola is just what we call a collection of grains, fruits, and spices, so mix it up! Throw some quinoa in there; get some buckwheat involved. And please tell me I’m not the only one who hears this dude when I say that recipes are guidelines not rules.
Bake it for less time than you think you need to. One of the best parts of granola (in my humble opinion) are the bigger, stickier chunks that hold up to milk or yogurt. I’m not as big of a fan of the shatter-into-a-million-pieces-of-oatmeal program. The granola will be hot and soft when you take it out of the oven, but the maple syrup will harden as it cools, so err on the shorter side.
I often toss this back dry and chase it with coffee as I’m on my way out the door, but don’t discount a good old fashioned bowl of granola and milk. It still hits, I promise!
Classic Granola
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