Second post today - holy cow! My breakfast was a yummy bowl of oatmeal (made with almond milk and water and a 1/2 banana mixed in at the end during cooking) and topped with a bit of Golden Temple French Vanilla Granola that we buy in bulk (but just now found online), almond butter, and strawberry jelly, served with a clementine.
Ryan slept in this morning as he's still adjusting to the time change and doesn't need to woken up early, unlike J, who is definitely having problems adjusting as well but DOES need to be up and ready to go for her earlier school time.
A little post-breakfast granola-making morning. The light at 6:45am is horrible around here so the flash went off on this one. It's so dark in the morning now!
Why did we set of to make granola today?
Because the kids keep eating my granola!!! Here's Jessi eating her granola with milk for breakfast. Ryan had the same thing. I bought enough to fill an entire 8 cup container on FRIDAY! And now there's about 1 1/2 cups left. It's only Monday morning people!!
So here we go. Rolled oats in a bowl.
Someone's very excited to have control of the honey! She had the most fun squeezing it out and mixing.
This was our first attempt at making granola and it was SO EASY! I didn't add any almonds because I noticed that Ryan's skin wasn't doing so well on his legs and it could be nothing but it also could be something and, unfortunately, I don't know if it's from almonds in this granola or from the mango he devoured last week. Need to keep an eye on this.
I opened my cookbooks to see which ones had granola recipes to use a starting point and I ended up blending some things from two that I found (How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman and Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison). Madison's recipe used fruit juice as part of the sweetening component and that intrigued me (especially since 1 cup of juice is so much less expensive than 1 cup of maple syrup) so I went with it. I add a bunch of spices to it that I wanted that definitely made things taste better as well as vanilla. Next time I would definitely do things differently. I think that the juice is the biggest thing I would change. Instead, I will try a mix of honey and maple syrup because I didn't like the texture of the finished granola and think that the juice might have been the culprit. It was chewier rather than crunchy.
Here's what went into our mix:
4 cups rolled oats
1 cup apple juice
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup shredded dried unsweetened coconut
1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp cardamom
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp vanilla extract
Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Mix all ingredients in a large bowl. Spread the mixture out onto a baking sheet in an even layer and bake for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Want to see who inspired this week's homemade goodness? Go check out what Ashley's cooking up!
After I dropped Jessi off at school, I came home and made tea for Ryan and I and we read some poems from Shel Silverstein at his request. While in the car line to take Jessi to school, Ryan was telling me that he was reading a funny book with an even funnier title, called Falling Up, at school. This started us talking on how we have lots of Shel Silverstein books on our very own bookshelves, which he didn't remember because they reside in Jessi's room and he had never shown interest in them when I've read them before - but how could I not jump on the chance to run with his interest?! We had a wonderful tea together as we took turns reading the poems that he had heard at school as well as some new ones.
