My first taste of Carissa’s homemade granola from the local bakery a few years ago prompted a revelation and may have changed my concept of breakfast forever. Evvy, my middle child, had left work for the day with a bagful and gave me some on the way home. Up to that point, most of the granola that I had tried came from the grocery store and tended to be over-sweet lumps of indeterminate source, often infused with flavors that approximated fruit but were not quite right. Impressed, I committed the ingredients to memory before Evvy snatched the bag back and vowed to make my own.
I have always been a do-it-yourselfer, even about food. I think this comes from taking the back-to-the-land hippie sensibility that was in the air as I grew up perhaps a bit too seriously. My bibles in this included the Foxfire series — make your own corn shuck mops! — and the late, great Helen Witty’s books on kitchen D.I.Y. These can be found on used-book sites and are well worth obtaining. My favorite from a young age was “Better Than Store-Bought: Authoritative Recipes for the Foods That Most People Never Knew They Could Make at Home,” co-authored with Elizabeth Schneider Colchie. I can’t remember now what I tried, but I recall being amazed that one could tie one’s own pretzels. I never did that, but I tried my hand at making tofu once.
Growing up at the beach, we were surrounded by beach plum bushes. Some years, their gnarled branches hung thick with fruit. Other years, they were scarce. Weather, I suspect, had something to do with that; a period of heavy rain in June portended a poor crop in August. My father made beach plum jelly and I watched. I carry the tradition on to this day and still have a few jars on a shelf that I put up last summer.
Granola is interesting in the home kitchen, in that no two batches taste quite the same. My recipe, if it is fair to call it that, incorporates nuts, flax seed, and plenty of cinnamon among the rolled oats. For sweetening, I dissolve brown sugar in hot water, then add maple syrup or honey. Sometimes, I add ground ginger, sometimes not. Near the end of baking, I add a handful of shredded coconut. Cranberries or currants go in once it has cooled. It is indeed better homemade if not quite as spectacular as the bag my daughter shared with me that started it all.