how to make granola.

just in case you don't plan on eating candy for breakfast.

This morning I painted a pair of neon green plastic glasses black. I climbed out the apartment window onto the adjacent roof with a cardboard dinosaur costume in hand. The belly of the beast acted as a windshield while I spritzed those little suckers with a can of leftover spray paint I’ve been hanging onto for the past two years waiting for just this sort of occasion.

Earlier this week, while on an hour-long zoom call with a city educational council I’d until recently been blissfully unaware of even existing, I quietly turned off my video and loosely hemmed a dress so that one of my children could be from the 70s. (Something I only came to learn meant the 1770s after they requested to borrow a friends’ floor-length, lace-bodiced frock and began to question me about whether I could please sew a quick corset. The answer was a firm no.)

Later today I’ll be stitching a cut-up sheet to a headband so that my smallest ghost will not trip over their costume all evening long. James is still trying to convince me to be a ghost with him, so that together we’ll be three ghosts, one wizard, and some girl from the 1770s, a merry troupe indeed.

All of this to say, that in a week when my family will be largely feasting on fun-sized Snickers bars and Reese’s peanut butter cups for breakfast, I was reminded to share my very favorite candy-free breakfast. Lately, I’ve found dumb comfort in making weekly trays of richly toasted granola. I keep on dropping hints and mentioning my morning comfort and then I keep on failing to follow up with answers from folks wanting to know more. Hopefully this letter fixes that.

The first thing to know is that every time I make the granola, the recipe changes. This morning, as I’ve been doing lately, I poured half a Bonne Maman jar of chia seeds into the mix. They get a little toasty, probably lose some of nutritional value they had, and they taste totally delicious, so I keep on doing it.

The point is, anything goes. The point is, we should all feel confident to experiment. The point is, the more you make something, the more you know how to make something and there’s both freedom and creativity in that, in equal measure. Now that I’ve gotten into the habit, granola is something that I make without a recipe at all, which means everything is eyeballed, only one bowl and one baking tray gets dirty, and I barely have to think about it.

Below I’ll share my go-to ingredients and my best tips. Should specificity be something that’s comforting to you right now or always, I’ve included links to two favorite recipes that offer more guidance in the way of pesky details like measures of volume or time.