Granola

This weekend was pretty busy with all the Diwali preparations and cleaning going on around the house. I made chooda/chiwda and and coconut barfi following my mother's recipe. They will be appearing very soon on the blog. I made the coconut barfi for the first time. The verdict- my husband has been eating it day and night...I just hope it lasts till Diwali. My whole home was filled with the enticing aroma of coconut and cardamom for hours. It was amongst these plans and tasks I decided to make granola.

I have been always looking forward to eat sugar and chocolate free granola cereal for breakfast and evening snacks, but I never thought it could be made so easily at home. Thanks to Priya from Akshaypaatram, I have finally found my heart's wish come true :). Here is the link to Priya's blog post.

I had maple syrup, honey and vanilla in my pantry, so the only things I needed to buy were the hazle nuts, oats and the pecans. It is interesting to go shopping for things which you have never shopped for before. I found Wheat Germ in the breakfast section tucked on the top most aisle...I guess it is not usually picked up by many people. I then started searching for flax seed and I could not find it in the breakfast aisle. I asked a staff "Where can I find flax seeds"...he turned towards puzzled and asks "Umm.. whats that..can you spell it for me". I say "F-L-A-X". He says "I do not think we have that in our store". I tell him that I was expecting to find it somewhere near wheat germ in the breakfast section. He says "Wheat germ...whats that? "...that is when I realized that he could not be of much help! It shows how much people know about health foods as compared to fast, frozen and ready to eat food. I again went to the breakfast section and a old lady helped to to find the flax seeds. But by then I found a organic mixture of Whole Rolled Oats, Wheat, pumpkin seed and ground Flax seed. It was a 400gm packet and I used all of it to make the granola.

Ingredients I used: 3 cups - Rolled oats + Whole Wheat (flattened wheat..looks just like oats but browner in color)+Pumpkin seeds + Flax seeds
1/4 cup each (unsalted)- Walnuts, Pecans, Hazelnuts - coarsely chopped
1/4 cup - Wheat bran
1/4 cup each (packed) - dried Cherries, plump Golden raisins - coarsely chopped
10-15 dates -coarsely chopped
10 cashew nuts- chopped
1 Tbsp - Butter
2 Tbsp - Oil (I had olive oil, but any vegetable oil works too)
2 Tbsp - Maple Syrup
2 Tbsp - Honey
1/2 tsp - pure Vanilla extract

I followed pretty much the same procedure as Priya's to make this granola. Here is how it looked before going into the oven.
It was raining cats and dogs here due to some storm in the Pacific ocean. It reminded me of the heavy rains in Pune and at times it would rain non stop, day and night for many days in a row. In such rainy days, my mom would make fried jack fruit papad's which we would get from Mangalore and various bhajiyas (vegetable fritters). We had ganola with yogurt, sliced bananas and strawberries on Monday and the granola with hot milk made a hearty breakfast on Tuesday morning when it was raining hard.

With my job there is not much time now a days for doing other activities like reading which I used to previously do very frequently. I mostly find time on weekends and during the week nights to catch up on my reading. I subscribe to Reader's Digest and Good Housekeeping and always eagerly wait for the latest issue to arrive by mail. Here are a few books I plan to finish soon...
Sense and Sensibility-- Auther: Jane Austin (Pride and Prejudice is another of her famous novel)
Reader's Digest
Healthy Living from the Inside Out (I picked up this from the library last week..found the introduction very interesting!)