Granola

I spent four years traveling between the states and Costa Rica between 2003 and 2007. Thirteen trips to be exact. Now, doing the math, it seems that during those four years, adding up the time that I was in country, I spent about two years of my life there. About one year of that time as a volunteer and student at a place called Rancho Mastatal. Every day at the ranch felt amazing and magical. Sometimes it was; watching bright green and black poison dart frogs on the buttresses of trees in the forest, leaping from a waterfall, walking barefoot in the red, tropical soil, prepping bamboo for building or cooking for a group of forty in the tiny kitchen (which has since been renovated -- I hear its downright "posh" these days!) Whatever the adventure may be, it was drastically different from my life as I knew it.

I come from a family of amazing cooks, so I am not going to go so far as to say that I learned to cook at the ranch, but I definitely honed my skills there. Cooking in a rural village in the tropics is both exciting and challenging. The availability of new, fresh ingredients is a treat to your senses. A neighbor stops by to sell eggs, oranges, cheese or milk to make yogurt. The vegetable truck comes once a week and baskets are filled with fresh produce and carried into the house. Everything else was either grown in the vegetable garden, or found locally around town.

One of the items on the weekly cooking agenda was always granola. Homemade granola is (in my opinion) far more delicious than its store bought rival. You have complete control over the amount of oil, sugar and addition of extras you'd like to put in there. I'm a fan of adding dried fruits (golden or regular raisins, apricots, cranberries, bananas, apples), nuts (almonds, walnuts or both) and sometimes coconut or ginger for a more interesting granola. At the ranch, granola with such fancy additions was a bit of a time suck (but well worth it) since adding coconut meant hunting down a ripe coconut, cracking it open, getting the meat out of the shell, and then chopping it into granola-sized pieces. Not that it wouldn't be enjoyable (for the sake of nostalgia) to buy a whole coconut at the store and prep it the Costa Rica way, I don't have that much time on my hands, so I've opted for the store bought flaked and unsweetened variety.

This is what I used:

3 C rolled oats
3/4 C chopped walnuts
3/4 C chopped almonds
3/4 C dried coconut flakes
1 t cinnamon
1/2 t salt
1/4 C canola oil
1/3 C honey
1 t molasses
1/2 C chopped dried apricots
1/2 C raisins
1/8 C finely chopped crystallized ginger

This is how I used it:

1. Pre-heat oven to 325 degrees F. Lightly grease a large baking sheet and set aside.
2. Combine oats, walnuts, almonds, coconut flakes and salt in a large bowl.
3. In a small bowl, whisk together oil, honey and vanilla. Pour onto oat mixture and mix well with your hands, ensuring that everything is well coated.
4. Spread on the baking sheet in an even layer and bake for 20-30 minutes or until golden, stirring every 10 minutes. Pay close attention while the granola is in the oven, as it quickly turns from perfect to burnt.
5. After the granola has cooled, add the dried fruit.
6. Store in an airtight container.

If you choose to, you can add the fruit to the granola in step two, but adding it at the end results in a nice, crunchy but chewy granola.