granola cruncher

Granola is a happening thing. Not just for tree huggers and hippies anymore. Not just for women who wear bucket hats with a ying yang patch on the front, using walking sticks and wearing hiking boots with their socks pulled up to the mid-calf.* Not just for those hooligans who don’t shave their  legs or wear deodorant. Those people are on to bigger and better things. Like hemp seeds and acai berries.

Me, I always liked granola. Especially from Rube. Rube is an older gentleman who works at the St. Lawrence market in Toronto. He has a little stand that sells rice and dried beans and quinoa, (he sold Quinoa before quinoa was cool, back when we were all pronouncing it Quinn-oh-ah), and also Granola. He sells lots of Granola. Out of huge tubs with metal scoops and into small brown bags wrapped up with a red elastic.

Ahhh Rube. He sold me granola every Saturday morning for most of my childhood. He let me weigh my own bag on his little scale… and then I would bust open the brown paper and eat all the raisins and apple pieces, those rolled oats were for suckers. I still do that, eat all the fruit that is. Just ask my dad the day after he buys a box of granola or muesli. Or ask my boyfriend. If you buy a breakfast cereal with fruit bits, you better believe that when you go to have a bowl in a couple days, there won’t be any fruit bits left. That’s just how I roll.

This granola is very unlike Rube’s Granola. But I would never even dream of trying to replicate his, cause I would never succeed. It’s the best granola ever.

This one is good too, it’s banana bread granola. It tastes like a big loaf of banana bread, but crunchy and in a bowl with some fruit and milk. yum.

Banana Bread Granola
adapted from here

Ingredients

3-4 c. old-fashioned oats

1 c. puffed millet (or puffed rice whatevs)

2 ripe bananas

1/2 cup coconut oil

1/3 cup maple syrup

1/2 tsp vanilla

1 tsp cinnamon

pinch of sea salt

1/2 cup walnuts

1/2 cup banana chips
Granola is pretty basic. Smoosh the bananas up – Mix the wet, mix the dry (excluding the banana chips), mix together and spread on a baking sheet (or two). Bake for 25-30 minutes at 325*C. Stir in Banana chips

Eat warm. It will harden as it cools and become very crunchy!

It’s not Rubes, but it’ll do for now.

xxx

*that woman is not fictional. She is all too real- A woman from my neighbourhood who I met on many walks on the Scarborough bluffs. She once stopped me to ask if my puppy was a ‘bitch or a dog’.  I was 11 years old. I knew only of bitch being a bad word, not meaning female dog, so needless to say I  was taken aback. When I told my mom, my mom replied with… “Oh she’s a Granola cruncher” and so now when I think of Granola crunchers I think only of that woman and her stupid ying-yang bucket hat.

And FOR the RECORD. you do not need hiking boots to walk around the Scarborough bluffs. Ok? It’s just unnecessary. Not exactly mountainous terrain…