Quarantine Diary #645 - Granola

Two recent tweets : Someone named Kate Harding tweeted; “What haunts me is that I am not just smart enough for so many people to be this much stupider than me.”

And from Di, Obstinate Hoper; “I’m starting to think of pandemic caution like labor: buckle down during peaks, relax a little between them. Hang in there, folks. It’s a damn long labor.”

About ten days ago I first heard the word omicron; last Tuesday I was still mispelling it. Then on Wednesday it changed our family’s plans to get together for Christmas yesterday. The Illinois family with kids in daycare did not all attend because their daycare center is devising stricter protocals, trying to keep their staff and 100-plus little kids safe. So just my daughter came; awesome son-in-law stayed home with the kiddos.  

We would like to visit them on Christmas so we are isolating this week to avoid potential exposure to this virulent virus variant.

Three vaccines and 645 days of masks and social distancing - and all of us are still in this worldwide epidemic because of some of us. Like Harding said: I’m not smart enough for this many people to be stupider than me. By which I mean people choosing to not get vaccinated. People choosing to not wear masks in populated places. People choosing to not make worldwide distribution of vaccines a priority. What planet do they think we are all living on?

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Since I’m going to be home a lot again maybe can re-up the Quarantine Diary. I can try.

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Mary sent me this quote from bell hooks. “No black woman writer in this culture can write “too much”. Indeed, no woman write can write “too much” … no woman has ever written enough.”

I thought about that for a day. Then (started this last Thursday) I asked myself, “What is a thing I’m doing today that has its roots in the times and places I have come from and through? What has no woman written enough about that actually says a lot about being a woman? Where does my personal experience today touch that question?”

This: I made granola this morning.  It’s in the oven now and my house smells wonderful. I know how to bake many things that my mom and grandmas made – but none of them made granola. Granola is just mine.

The first time I even read the word “granola” was in Seventeen magazine when I was (wait for it) seventeen. I don’t remember the plot of the story I was reading other than the protagonist wanted to go to the University of Chicago where she wanted to meet the kind of people who ate yoghurt and granola.  And yeah, she spelled it yoghurt. 

That’s what I remember. I was a kid who, like every kid, needed her own path into her own damn life. If a young person doesn’t find their path, they end up either as copies of their parents or adults who define themselves as everything their parents are not. I couldn’t have verbalized that then, but the dynamic was at work inside me. What am I curious about? What do I want to know more about?

It’s the work of adolescence to discover what one is interested in and then try to go that way, often the clues to that path are unbelievably subtle. Like wanting to know what yoghurt is and where one can find granola. I eventually figured out those foods were traditional foods currently eaten by beatniks, poets, health nuts, and hippies. I guess I intuited that those people might become my people.

Granola took me places. It was a small and hardly noticeable clue that I was going to go where people valued it. When I found my people, they were likely going to be women and men with curiosity, questions, and energy.

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So one of the bounces from thinking about granola is this. As of today, I realize this granola thing is why some people ridicule some people for being “crunchy.”  There are folks out there using “crunchy” as a stereotype. If one chooses to think twice about the food they eat, the way they raise their kids, the cars they drive, what kind of medical care they seek and when they seek it – sometimes choices are called “crunchy’’ and dismissed. 

This judgementalism of some people/women about other people/women is crazy and toxic. Just saying.  If you feel as if people are judging you for choices as innocuous as “granola; yes or no?” – lose those people and lose those thoughts. 

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I can hear Mary (and other BFF’s in my life) shaking their head at me. “How do you even remember that old stuff, MB?  How do you remember such a boring detail from a magazine short story you read 50 years ago?”  Okay, I will admit it’s humorous what my brain remembers and forgets. Brains are like that. 

But here is a better question. What have YOU read in the past 10-50 years that you still remember? What plot or detail do you remember? The way a room was described?  The specific way a bad guy approached a victim?  What kind of dog saved what kind of kid? 

Sometimes we pay too much attention to what we, as fully mature and responsible adults (hah) think we ought to pay attention to. 

If we lean back, take some deep breaths, put down our phones and tasks and books and let our minds wander – what do we remember?  As a writer and human being, I think a lot of our fulfilled and unfulfilled hopes and dreams are in the specifics of those quiet old memories.

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Okay, you want to know how I make granola? I’ve got 40-some years of granola assembling in me and this is what I know. I first learned from the recipe in More with Less cookbook which was the most illuminating and helpful cookbook of my life. Very crunchy. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/925697.More_With_Less_Cookbook

Decide how much granola you want to end up with. I make 10-20 cups at a time, depending on how much I want to share.  You will have to mix it later so you want a big bowl or a tall-sided soup pot so it won’t fall out in the mixing.

Whatever amount your want, half of that amount is dry oatmeal.

Take the same bowl or quart measuring container you just measured out your oatmeal into - and begin to fill it to the same amount with whatever hearty ingredients you have. Wheat germ, wheat bran, seeds, nuts, cornmeal, whole wheat flour, flaxseeds, chia, cereals, and on and on.

I usually add only a half-cup of the priciest items.  Half cup of chia, brans and germs, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds.

Add some flours and/or cornmeal because as you stir and bake, those flours clump with other ingredients to make those lovely, desirable crunchy granola lumps.

Here is the secret to affording this stuff: cheerios and cornflakes, probably house brand.  Add several cups of these cereals.

When you have the dry ingredients in your containers add 1 to 1 ½ cups vegetable or corn oil plus one cup of brown sugar.

Stir this all about 50 stirs and then pour into a large flat pan. I used an ‘disposable’ aluminum turkey pan for years.

Bake/dry in a 225 over for 2-3 hours. 

Every single time I have make this, I use different amounts and ingredients. 

This was Thursday’s granola. 10 cups oatmeal, ½ c cornmeal, 1 c wheat germ, ½ c sesame seeds, ¾ c sunflower seeds, 1 c chopped walnuts, ¾ c flax seeds, ½ c chopped pepitas, 1/3 c chia seeds, ¾ c whole wheat flour, 3 c cheerios, 2 c cornflakes, 1 c brown sugar, 1 ½ c corn oil.

Add dried fruit when you eat it, not in the making/baking process. Otherwise you end up with tooth breakers.

When my son was a teenager, I used way more cereals because no one can afford to fill a teenage boy on chia seeds. These days I make it healthy and rich, because my adult kids and Len and I mostly eat it as a topping on plain cereals (and, um, ice cream).  Then again, these days son takes it hunting and fishing to eat by the handful at dawn.