Totally off topic

Yes, I know that usually all I do over here is post what I wear, but y'all, last night I made granola from scratch (people apparently do this) and it was so good that I felt compelled to share it.

I got the recipe from my sister in law who got it from a cookbook (though I don't know which one) but I am incapable of following recipes, so I put my own little twist on it.

So here's what you need for this delicious granola:

1. An oven
2. A couple cookie sheets (or an assortment of oddly sized baking dishes as you'll soon see)
3. An hour of your life that you can devote to stirring and timing
4. All the ingredients below

Ingredients:

• 6 cups old-fashioned oats
• 2 cups flour
• 2 cups packed brown sugar (I only had one, so I used one cup of brown and one of white)
• 2 cups flaked coconut
• 1-1/2 cups of nuts (I used a combo of chopped pecans and slivered almonds)
• 1 cup wheat germ
• 1 cup All Bran cereal
• cinnamon (I think I used 1 T)
• 3/4 cup veg oil
• 3/4 cup water
• 2 T vanilla extract
• 1 t salt
• 1 cup raisins
• assorted dried fruit (I used a combo of chopped dried apricots, dried blueberries, and dried cherries and didn't measure this at all - about a cup, I think)

And here's how you put it all together:

Preheat your oven to 275 F.
Find the biggest bowl you own and mix the oats, flour, sugar, coconut, nuts, wheat germ, All Bran, and cinnamon. Make sure to break up all those clumps of sugar. It'll then look like this:


In another bowl, mix the oil, water, vanilla, and salt. Ooh and ah over the layers of liquid. No pics of this, but believe, layers of oil and water never get old. Add the wet ingredients to the dry and stir for approximately five thousand years until all the dry ingredients are wet. It won't be soaking wet, of course, just coated with a little liquid.
Spray your pans with cooking spray.

If you were a real baker (i.e. not me) you'd probably have two cookie sheets. I didn't, so I made do - and then figured out that I needed one more pan. Whoops.


Spoon your granola into a thinnish layer and put it in the oven. Be prepared to stir every ten minutes for the next hour.

While the granola was toasting away, I chopped up some dried apricots, mixed those with some dried blueberries, dried cherries, and raisins. I put the fruit in the bowl where I started mixing the dry ingredients only to realize it was too small, then I made a weird face and B. took a picture.


After an hour during which you grow to hate the oven timer for marking out ten minute intervals, pull the granola out of the oven and let it cool. Once it's cool, combine it with the fruit.


Serve yourself a bowl and give yourself a pat on the back for creating such deliciousness.

Bonus points if you don't drop your first bowl on the floor after two bites.