GRANOLA!

I got hooked on granola when I lived in Kenya. I didn't have a house helper there, but my neighbors did. Their helpers would make granola and they would share with us. There wasn't a whole lot of milk or yogurt available (unless you like camel milk sold in a plastic bag), so I learned to just eat it plain. When I got back to America, I found that granola is stinkin expensive, so I never really ate it there other than the occasional granola bar on the go. Then I moved to Indonesia. And I got a house helper. And I found out that she can make granola! So I have her make it from time to time.

Apparently, I got Aswan hooked as well, and a few weeks ago, he wanted to learn how to make it himself. So we made a batch ourselves during fall break loosely based on a recipe I found on the internet. It came out not very crunchy and a little odd tasting. I chalk that up to the fact that my brown sugar had fermented and the honey was 3 years old. We still ate it all.

Wednesday, boyfriend came down with a nasty cold. Thursday he had to get up at like 5 AM to drive some people to a conference in Surabaya - the second biggest city on the far East coast of Java, about 7 hours away. So what did he do Wednesday night? He drove his bike to my house. In the rain. And asked if we can make some granola because he really wanted to eat granola. Apparently granola is now his comfort food. He was so wet and sounded so sick, so of COURSE we made some! He wanted to make his own, and since we had made it once before and knew what was good and what needed improvement, we both made our own batches, no recipe involved. He wanted his crunchy. It ended up turning black and tasting kind of burnt because he left it in the oven for like an hour. But mine came out great! Boyfriend was gonna take his to Surabaya with him so that he would have something to snack on while driving, but I put my foot down and made him take mine. There was a little that didn't fit in the container, so I ate that much. And it was GOOD. So Aswan was like, "You need to write down how you made that so we can make it again". So I wrote it down the way I remembered it, and here is my recipe for really good granola. It's easy!

Ingredients:
1/4 kg oatmeal
1/2 a stick of melted butter (real butter)
3 giant spoonfulls of brown sugar
quite a bit of cinnamon
a tiny bit of nutmeg
several squirts of vanilla extract
a handful of flax seed
a handful of sesame seeds
1/10 kg dried shredded coconut
the rest of a bottle of honey
like 5 spoonfulls of sunflower seed oil or any other vegetable-type oil

Turn the oven on to some arbitrary temperature. Mix up all the ingredients in a bowl then press them onto a cookie sheet and bake until it smells like it might start to burn soon. Take it out and let it cool. Then you can cut it up into bars or crumble it up in chunks.

Alternatively, you could just dump the mixture onto the cookie sheet and spread it out fairly evenly. Get it out and stir it up every 10 minutes so the bottom doesn't burn, and then you'll have cereal-type granola. That's what we did last time and what boyfriend did this time. He just kept deciding it wasn't crunchy enough and putting it back in for 10 more minutes. As it cools, it tends to get crunchier though...

I like granola because you can throw in just about anything you want. Dried fruit, sunflower seeds, chocolate chips, nuts, a brisket. The possibilities are endless.