Gifty Granola

          For the last 5 years for Christmas, I have given my relatives cookie mix in a jar (basically a jar with layers of flour, sugar, chocolate chips, m and ms, cranberries, nuts, rice crispies, oats, etc that the lucky recipient can whip out wonderful cookies by just adding eggs and butter).  However, unlike previous years when I have had two whole weeks after finishing finals until Christmas, this week I only had ONE week, so I for some reason felt like I did not have in my oh-so-busy schedule to spend two hours making cookie jars. So I decided I should do something else instead.

           Since I have the artistic talent of a first grader, I decided I needed to stick with food.  Everyone likes food, right? I also really couldn't abandon the whole jar idea (not like having to stick with the jar idea really limited my options since we all know that ANYTHING can be eaten out of a jar).  I should also note that  I'm trying to slowly make this blog transition from its current state (Peanut Butter crunch bites, Oreo truffle filled cupcakes, pumpkin pie bars, etc) to its original state (HEALTHY whole wheat pumpkin muffins and HEALTHY squash mac and cheese).  I don't want to make that transition cold turkey though, so I decided to go with one of the foods that commonly straddles the line between health food and not health food: granola!

            Luckily, I am at my family home right now so Gertrude did not have to be involved with this project that has a lot of burn potential.  I just realized that is two weeks in a row without Gertrude, but I think this is a well needed break between us- distance makes the heart grow fonder. Anyways, the oven at my family home is pretty solid- it is definitely a plus that it can fit two baking sheets on a rack (Gertrude of course can fit exactly 1.8 sheets in her until she refuses to close- I guess she just insists we leave her on for hours at a time while making cookies). For that reason, I'm glad this other oven...let's call him..... Steve.... can fit multiple sheets, because this project literally would have taken exactly 15 hours in Gertrude.  I am not kidding.

For this project, I used the recipe:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/granola-recipe/index.html

             I followed it exactly as listed- I even bought good maple syrup instead of using the maple syrup in my fridge that was really just high fructose corn syrup dyed brown with a truckload of vanilla flavoring dumped in.  I had a temporary crisis when I realized the cashews I bought were salted.  I put them in a colander and washed the salt away.  Crisis averted.

            The whole baking process was quite intensive .  Granola is very susceptible to burning, so I had to stir the granola every fifteen minutes to prevent some parts from turning to ash.  However, my intensive TLC to the granola was worth it, since I only burned 1 out of 6 batches.. not too shabby. After it baked and cooled for a while, I jarred it up in some 1 quart jars.

           Looks a little bit boring, huh? These were a bit bland looking (not tasting, luckily!), so I needed to somehow jazz them up.  If I had time and motivation, I would whip out my hot glue gun and fabric scraps and make nice little fabric skirts on the lids.  However, I had about 15 minutes total to finish this last part of the project so I needed something simple.  My conclusion? shove paper bags in the printer to make labels to give the "rustic look".  Even though the sounds the printer was making as the labels were made were really troublesome, I was quite happy with my quick fix. Here are the the final results!