Homemade Granola

So you read the title and thought, "OMG Thea's become a hippy. She's probably growing out her armpit hair and installing hydroponics in her closet. I can't believe she made her own granola.” Well, it’s true folks. No, not the hippy part, just the granola. But I had a damn good excuse.

I went grocery shopping the other day, at Safeway.com, and while I was sitting in front of the breakfast isle I thought, “Hey, I should get oatmeal.” This was a couple weeks ago, you know, the dog days of summer - that sweltering time of year when San Francisco is about 57 degrees. So I ordered what I was pretty sure was oatmeal.

This is one of the hazards of online grocery shopping. You can never know exactly what you’re going to end up with. It makes it exciting. In the past, I’ve mysteriously received cat food (I don’t have a cat), ice cream (which really wasn’t so bad), a fish filet (oooh it was terrible, don’t tell Keithen it was ever in the house, or he’ll convince himself that he can still smell it), and very large, heavy amounts of filtered water, none of which can be explained, and fortunately none of it was on my bill. But this time, I just screwed up and didn’t read what I was buying. Instead of Quaker Oatmeal, I accidentally purchased Quaker Oats. Forty-two ounces of them.

Same thing, right? I opened it up one morning, hoping to make a nice mushy bowl of oatmeal, but there was something not quite right about it. It was all oats, no meal. Whole oats. Like what horses eat. I thought, “Well, I’m sure it’ll be just as good as oatmeal,” and scooped some into a bowl, added boiling water, and gave it a stir. You know, oatmeal-style. People, they are not the same thing at all. Not at all. OK chemically, biologically, exactly the same – but in terms of breakfast they are completely different. Oats are inedible to humans in their natural state.

So my next thought after dumping my horrific breakfasty failure was, “What the fuck am I supposed to do with all these fucking oats?” And then it hit me.

Granola.

I googled “homemade granola” and discovered that granola only requires three ingredients: oil, some kind of sweetening substance, and of course oats. Oh, I was so totally going to spend the rest of the day making granola. Until I ran out of maple syrup. Which I did pretty fast, actually.

I used grapeseed oil because it’s healthy and has a light, slightly nutty flavor. (If you have not discovered the wonder that is grapeseed oil, I strongly suggest you go find some right now and get fryin’.) I added some maple syrup, a spoonful of honey, an unnatural amount of cinnamon, and finely chopped blueberry yogurt Luna bar that, realistically, neither of was ever going to eat. I mixed it all together, put it on my nonstick cookie sheet, and baked it up.

Mmmmm. My granola was a golden-brown, cinnamony success.

Then I made homemade crackers. They weren’t as good.

This morning I finished the week’s worth of granola that I made, and I plan to make more, because I’ve barely made a dent in my 2+ pounds of oats. I don’t know how future batches will turn out, but this batch of homemade cinnamon blueberry-Luna-bar granola gets a 7.8 out of ten.