Crunchy Maple-Walnut Granola (low fat)

I’ve been working.  A lot.

I’ve made myself quite tired, in fact.

So I’ve decided to take a vacation.  By myself.  To visit friends.

It’s been a long time since I’ve taken a vacation by myself – not since 2004.  And really, as anyone who has travelled with children knows, it’s not really a vacation if you’re travelling with children because they still need to be fed and cleaned and looked after, even if you’re not at home.  And if you’re not at home, they probably need feeding, cleaning, and looking after even more than usual.  So let’s just agree that I haven’t had a vacation in nine years.  That’s a long time.  But now my children are old enough to take care of themselves for several days while I’m resting.

Okay, I’m not really going to be resting, but I like to think of it as resting, as I won’t be working.  Well, not for money, anyway.  But the children won’t be there, so it will be something like resting.  And rest is what I most want to do.

But between now and this theoretical time of resting, I find there is ever so much more to do than there was before I decided to go away.  Things like making sure Anthony passes his driver’s license test (so he can drive to the store and buy milk while I’m gone), buying new shoes, and organizing all my digital photos.

If there really is so much to do, you may be asking yourself, why have I decided that now is the time to best time organize my photos?  Why not wait until I get back?  Surely organizing the photographs isn’t of the highest priority?  Well, very simply, I can’t fit any more photos onto my laptop.  It’s full.  To the rafters.  And although I’m going to London where I’ve been many times before (photos from which are a large part of what needs to be sorted), I am also going to be spending time time in the north of England, in Yorkshire, specifically in Leeds (where I’ve never been) and York (where I haven’t been for a really long time).  If I was staying only in London, I don’t know how many new photos I might take – probably not too many this time around, since I have quite a good album from my last visit (and this time I’m going without children!), but I will be taking many, many new photos in Yorkshire, and until I make some space for them to live, I won’t be able to do anything with them.  And of course I will want to share them right away, and so need to make space for them.

This is a time consuming project, cumbersome and multiphased, but it has three positive, predictable outcomes:  1. I have upgraded my Flickr account so that I can add an unlimited number of photos, making it a useful thing in my life; 2. I have upgraded my WordPress account so I can add more photos here and continue to post thoughts and recipes, as I had previously filled all the space that was available to me for free; 3. I can actually access my photos and make them available to do things with, such as produce books and cookbooks and greeting cards and calendars and such things as are done with photographs.  There might be additional happy byproducts of this organizational drive, but I am content to have these three already underway.

As I began going through my photographs, looking at the many that I’ve taken for this blog, I began to realize how much I’ve learned about photography while I’ve been working on it, and remembering how much I enjoyed creating this collection of recipes and remembrances.  It’s brought me back but with a renewed purpose:  not just to share recipes I like, but to consider a wider range of things, such as books, movies, lost domestic arts, the environment and sustainability, seasonality, and a delight in the little things of life.

That said, I do have a new recipe to share.

Did you know that granola is the new pink?  Or maybe it’s the new bacon.  There is bacon granola, or so I’ve heard.  Whatever.

I was reading about it in the New York Times recently, and apparently granola is the new big thing for chefs.  I didn’t know.  I feel so uninvited to the party.  But really, I live in Vermont, and granola has never been out of fashion in my lifetime, so the fact that it’s in fashion elsewhere makes everywhere else seem like the latecomer.

It’s been quite a long time since my last post, and part of the reason why I haven’t posted any recipes lately is that I had an unpleasant gallstone episode at New Year’s, and the advice I received at the hospital was to follow a low-fat, high-fiber diet until I can arrange to have my gallbladder removed.  I don’t really want to have my gallbladder removed, and since that was the first trouble I’d had with gallstones, and I’ve felt fine since, I’ve decided to follow the low-fat, high-fiber advice indefinitely, as that is a smart thing to do even without the encouragement of gallstones.  All the lovely cakes and scones that I was featuring here are not part of a low-fat, high-fiber diet.  And yes, I’ve made wholewheat scones, but they don’t produce that sense of luxury and self-indulgence as the ones made with white flour, and really, if I didn’t want to feel self-indulgent, I wouldn’t eat a scone.

As anyone who knows me will attest, bread is my very favorite food.  I love it fresh and I love it toasted.  I especially love it toasted with butter and jam, served alongside a cup of steaming hot tea.  It doesn’t get any better than that for me.  But, that’s not exactly low-fat, high-fiber either.  It can be somewhat, but not really.  So I’m trying to wean myself off the bread, and while it was easy to give up cheese and peanut butter, and somewhat easy to give up bacon and sausage, and I didn’t eat much red meat anyway so that wasn’t really like giving up anything, I have found that I really don’t want to give up hot buttered toast.  But I’m trying.  As an alternative for breakfast, I’ve been encouraging myself to eat more cereals.

Breakfast cereal is one of the most processed foods going.  I have an outright ban on processed foods in my house, and have had for as many years as I’ve had children, but wholegrain, low-sugar breakfast cereals never seem like processed foods.  But they are.  Some are definitely better than others at living up to their wholesome reputations, but trying to keep any in the house is impossible.  They are expensive, and there is so little in some of those boxes, that trying to have cereal for breakfast in the morning is costing too much and making lots of trouble.

So last week while I was searching the cereal aisle at the grocery store, trying to figure out what I should do, I saw a box of granola that I very nearly purchased.  It was maple-pacan granola, in a very tiny box, very expensive, and made in Oregon.  I live in Vermont, a very long way from Oregon.  We grow oats here and produce maple syrup here, so it didn’t seem right that I buy that overpriced box of oats and nuts when I could make my own granola at home from local oats and local maple syrup.  (Yeah, okay, the walnuts are from California – we can’t produce everything good here.)

I’ve made granola before with less than satisfactory results, and this time I decided that rather than following someone else’s recipe, I would start with the idea of what I wanted the finished granola to be, and reverse-engineer it.  It’s a good system, and I highly recommend it.

What almost got me to buy that box of granola in the store was the photo on the front of the large clusters of maple-coated nuts, enlarged to show detail.  As I began preparing my ingredients this morning, I decided that I didn’t want to have to enlarge my photos to show detail – I wanted the details to be large on their own.  And I wanted cinnamon, because I love cinnamon, and it’s warm and delicious.  I did not want coconut, because I don’t want that texture.  I wanted it mapley, and I wanted it crunchy, and I wanted it low fat.

I preheated the oven to 350 F, then I poured some rolled oats into a bowl.  I knew this was going to be about technique more than “recipe,” so I decided right from the beginning that I wasn’t going to measure anything.  I wanted to be able to just throw this granola together and get on with other things.

I bought some walnuts yesterday, specifically for this granola, since I like walnuts better than pecans.  I bought them in bulk from the co-op since they are fresher than most packaged walnuts in the grocery store (and less expensive).  I had a few walnuts left in the jar where I keep walnuts, so I poured the older walnuts onto the cutting board and then poured the new walnuts into the jar.  When the jar was full, I poured the rest of the new walnuts onto the cutting board and that’s how I decided how many walnuts to put in the granola.  (Sometimes decisions are just that easy.)

I started chopping the walnuts, but it didn’t take long for me to tire of chopping walnuts, so thought to myself, “remember how that photo on the box had to be enlarged to show the texture?  Don’t be like that.  Stop chopping now, let the pieces be large.  This isn’t a tea bread or cake that you’re making.  It’s chunky granola.  Let it be chunky.”  So I did.

Then I turned to the cinnamon.

I wanted the oats to be cinnamony, not the maple syrup, so I tossed the cinnamon onto the oats first, to dust them lightly.

How much cinnamon did I use?  This much:

I suppose I could have done a Justin Wilson and poured the cinnamon from my hand into a measuring spoon, but that would have defeated the purpose of the exercise.

Then I tossed the walnuts with the cinnamony oats, and poured the darkest maple syrup I could find over it all.

Mmmm…

The oats and walnuts are coated with maple syrup, ready to go onto a heavily buttered, shiny baking sheet.

After I spread the oats and nuts evenly across the buttered baking sheet, I poured additional maple syrup over the oats in ribbons across the pan, but I did NOT stir.  I wanted the maple syrup to settle on the bottom of the heavily buttered shiny pan (this being the reason for the pan to be HEAVILY buttered and SHINY) where I trusted it would cook faster than the oats would toast, making little crispy candied bits which would contribute to the crunchiness of the finished granola and give it a more pronounced maple flavor.

You can lick the bowl after you put the baking sheet in the oven.

How long did I let the granola bake?  Until it was a fine golden brown.  I am aware that overbaking my granola has been a problem for me in the past, and having been reminded recently that granola always comes out of the oven soft, but firms up as it cools, I judged doneness based on the level of toasting of the walnuts rather than the crispness of the oats.  This was a good call.

Over the toasted granola, I sprinkled some raw wheat germ.

I read somewhere many years ago that toasting wheat germ destroys certain vitamins, and since wheat germ is full of goodness, including the sometimes hard-to-get-enough-of vitamin E, I make sure to follow that advice and always have my wheat germ raw.

And on top of that, I zested an orange, because I believe everything is improved by the flavor of orange.

At this point, the granola has begun to cool just enough that the sugars in the maple syrup are beginning to set, so it is the right time to take a large spatula and gently lift the granola from the bottom of the pan so it isn’t stuck there forever but does make nice large crunchy chunks.  Don’t use a nonstick pan – please don’t ever use a nonstick pan – just don’t leave the pan to cool while you go off to do something else.  It needs your attention for another couple minutes, then you can go off and do what else must be done.

Anna is just home from school.  She tasted the granola (it crunched loudly) and said that it’s just sweet enough that it could be put over ice cream and topped with chocolate and that would make it perfect.

When I go away, I’ll leave a big bucket of this granola and a gallon of yogurt, but the kids will be on their own to magic up some ice cream.