Adventures in Nutty Granola

A few weeks ago, M and I went up to Southern Vermont for Family Work Day for the Jenckes Foundation. Family Work Day is filled with trail work aka lopping, chainsawing, hacking and stacking. We spent most of the day removing fallen trees from the ski trails in the form of chucking 60lb logs into the woods.

We started the morning at M2's house with a delicious granola breakfast care of my Mama. I broke my "no grains" rule to indulge in some coconutty, oaty granola from Healthy Living, an amazing health food store up in Northern VT. Mostly, I broke my rule so that I could have some of my mom's homemade fruit compote, which is soon to be replicated, but the granola was phenomenal.

Since tasting the forbidden granola, I've wanted to try and make my own. I found a guide on Girl Gone Primal and modified it a bit to make my own, nutty granola.

Nutty Granola

Ingredients:
Almonds
Cashews
Walnuts
Unsweetened shredded coconut
3 Tbs maple syrup
5 egg whites

I put all of the nuts into a bowl to soak for a few hours.

Chester was curious. I'm not sure of my exact nut measurements: I used an entire bag of raw almonds from Trader Joe's, half a bag of raw cashews and 1/2 cup walnuts.(This recipe can be modified for any amount of nuts: you just have to change the number of egg whites and maple syrup.)

I soaked the nuts for about three hours-- until they had soaked up almost all of the water in the bowl and looked nice and soft.

I ground the nuts cup by cup in the food processor,

and whisked the maple syrup and egg whites in a separate bowl.

I combined the nut and egg white mixtures, making sure that all of the nuts were covered in egg.

After lining a baking sheet with parchment paper, I spread out a 1/2 inch layer of the mixture. I baked the nutola for about 10 minutes at 350, stirred (or flipped) and then continued to bake for another 10 minutes.

I completed this flipping/stirring step a few more times before the nuts were browned and toasted looking.

Once the nuts were done baking, I added the coconut flakes.

I attempted to shake the nuts and coconut together in a plastic bag. However, we are cheap, so our plastic bags are ghetto and don't seal very well (and I'm a gross kid), so there was a granola explosion.

I managed to salvage most of the goods and we ate them with almond milk, blueberries and some demon peanut butter for our Sunday Breakfeast. Needless to say, I'm all nutted out-- I can't even think about nut butter without longing for some cold, crisp vegetables. The granola is great though, and I'm going to attempt to make some fruit compote in the next week or so-- it needs some fruit to lighten it up-- all of those nuts just go straight to my chins!

Lazy Paleo Cookies

I call the following endeavor "Lazy Paleo Cookies" for the following reasons:

1. I used a vegan recipe from Eat Me Delicious, but replaced some ingredients I didn't have with ingredients I did have, because I was too lazy to go grocery shopping.
2. The cookies are not really "paleo" cookies, because they have maple syrup and honey in them...which are better than regular, white sugar, but some paleo sticklers will say that any sweetener is no good.
   
3. The finished product was not actually a "cookie" per se...mostly because I was too lazy to grind my almond flour fine enough...
   

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup almond meal
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 cup sunflower seeds
• 1/4 cup pumpkin seeds
  
• 1/4 cup dried cranberries
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp sea salt
• 1 Tbsp maple syrup
• 2 tbsp almond milk
• 1 tsp raw honey
• 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
• 3 tbsp coconut oil
  

I mixed all of the dry ingredients into a bowl and stirred to combine.

My coarsely ground almond flour

The rest of the ingredients went into another bowl. The recipe called for flax meal, but when I tried to grind my flax seeds, they just kind of spun around in the food processor...and I was lazy, so I just added some kinda-broken-flax seeds to the mix.

I combined the wet and dry ingredients and stirred until they were just barely mixed together...


Plopped about 1 Tbsp of "batter" onto an ungreased cookie sheet and cooked for 10 minutes at
350.


The result was more of a granola than a cookie. I have a feeling that the cookies crumbled because the almond flour was too coarse, and because there was no flax meal. The next time I attempt this recipe, I will make sure to be diligent with my almond flour, and maybe add an egg to keep everything together. Granola is fine. Granola is great! Something for M to put on his oatmeals in the morning.

Have you ever had a recipe turn out differently than you...err....expected?