So I visited my friend Leah last week in Minneapolis, and it was a perfect midwest mini-vacation. Leah is an amazing host, and one of the highlights of the trip was eating her homemade granola with yogurt and white nectarines (why can't I find good nectarines here??) every morning.
Another culinary highlight of the trip was the Juicy Lucy (sometimes spelled Jucy Lucy), which is a cheeseburger with the cheese in the middle of the burger. Maybe sometime I will try to make those. (The photo of Leah above was taken in the oddly-oriented restroom of Matt's, the bar in Minneapolis where Jucy Lucys were invented. Or weren't. Check wikipedia, I guess.)Another culinary highlight of the trip was this drink: Jameson whiskey and R.W. Knundsen's Simply Nutritious Lemon Ginger Echinacea juice.
But back to the granola! I was thinking of calling Leah to ask her how she made it, but I didn't want to wake her up (why am I making granola at midnight?). I think she said she used Smitten Kitchen's recipe? So this is an adaptation of that.
Ingredients:3 cups rolled oats
1 cup coconut chips
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/3 cup chopped almonds
2/3 cup chopped pecans
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup honey
cinnamon
salt
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/2 cup dried figs, chopped (man, I could take pictures of figs all day)
Method:
Preheat oven to 375. Line a shallow baking pan with parchment paper. Shoo the cat away from the ingredients.
Mix together all the ingredients except the dried fruit, and spread mixture evenly on the baking pan. Bake for 15 minutes, checking on it and stirring it a couple times. Add dried fruit, and bake for 5 more minutes.
Remove from pan and cool. And, oops, pick out the burnt bits. Next time, readjust oven temperature / baking time.
And this I learned from Leah, as well as from Smitten Kitchen: keep the granola in the freezer! It will stay crispy forever that way.
Hey you want some granola? Sounds good, let's have some when we go back inside.
