Chai Spice Granola

This is the confusing time of year. The time of year where one day feels like fall, bordering on winter, and then the next day feels like Oklahoma didn't get the memo that it doesn't lie directly on the equator. You never know if the next day you need to wear a sundress or a scarf. It's weird. Weird Oklahoma.

On a recent fall-ish sort of day, I decided to make granola. But you know me... I get bored easily. Boring old same-same granola didn't sound like any fun to me. So I thought I'd try something different. The result was delightful. Crunchy, crispy, clumpy granola with a spicy bite to it. Sooo good with homemade yoghurt. Just ask my mom. She tried some.

It literally tastes like chai tea.... in granola form.
Yeah.
Awesome.
So awesome you want to make yourself right now, right?
Ok, ok, stop begging. I'll give you the recipe.

 

Keep in mind that this is granola, and therefore, things don't have to be exactly like in my recipe. If you want walnuts, then add walnuts. If you don't want/have sesame seeds, don't add them. Anything that is crunchy and that you want in your granola, then by all means, add it in.  Oats are kind of important though. Don't leave out the oats.

By this time, the house smells really good. Really, really good. By the time the granola is finally done, I want to eat it all
all
all.

Chai Granola (print recipe)

Ingredients:
4c oats
1c almonds
1/4 c sesame seeds
1/2 c brown sugar
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp ground black pepper

1/2 c vegetable oil
4 Tbsp sesame oil (or just more vegetable oil)
1/4 c honey
2 Tbs sugar
2 tsp vanilla

1/2c raisins

Mix the ingredients from oats to pepper in a large mixing bowl. Remember that you are in charge here, if you want more or less of anything, go for it. I like extra ginger and pepper, it makes the granola more spicy. I also have a real hard time not adding more cinnamon and nutmeg. I like spiciness in my granola. Pretty much, I just think of the oats as the things which hold the yummy spices. If I could make granola just out of spices, I probably would.

In a small sauce pan, mix the oils, honey, and sugar. Bring to a boil and simmer for a little while, whisking constantly, until it is all frothy. It will make this bubbly froth stuff. That's when you add the vanilla. Then pour the frothy stuff all over the dry mix, and stir the two together really well. Mix, mix, mix, until all the oats have that yummy sweet honey stuff on them.

Spread the granola out on a cookie sheet, no more than 1/4- 1/2 inch thick. Bake this in the oven at 300F for about 15 minutes, or until it looks golden brown.

Take out the cookie sheet and set it out to cool. Do not mix granola up at this point unless you do not want clumpy granola. But I like clumpy granola. Then, when it is dry (it will be hard), scrape it up off the cookie sheet with a spatula, break it into the size of clumps you want, and add the raisins. The reason I add the raisins now is because I have had too many bad experiences with the raising burning into little charcoal balls in the oven long before the rest of the granola is crispy.

Pour all of your granola into a cute jar. Seriously, if you are going to cook you really need a bunch of cute jars. It's important. Go buy them at thrift stores for fifty cents apiece. Or ask your mother-in-law to get them at garage sales for you. That works for me.

Pet Yeast.

I bake a lot.
A whole lot.
My friends will affirm this.
There are two problems with baking a lot. The first problem is that if you bake a lot, and eat what you bake, then you eat a lot of baked goods. Why is this a problem, you ask? Well, it isn't a problem for my super-skinny-never-gain-weight husband. But it is a problem for me, because if I so much as look at a piece of cake I can just feel the weight piling on. Oh, well. I will eat more salad later. Because baked goods are good for the soul. I just know it. And I care about my soul.

The second problem is that the stuff for baking can be expensive. Flour is cheap, as is sugar, but things like, say, yeast can be pricey. And when Morgan and I can put away two loaves of French bread in one day (yes, the two loaves in that picture are now history), if I used a package of yeast for every batch of bread, that would add up pretty darn quick.

But never fear. I have a solution. Because I am poor. And because I love to bake. And because I would much rather spend the money on new clothes AND still have the yeast to bake with. For free. Because free is better than not free.

So how do I get free yeasts, you may ask? Well, simple. I raise them. My pet yeasts. In a jar. In my fridge. Just waiting to be mixed with flour and left to consume sugar and toot out carbon dioxide and make my bread fluffy and full of bubbles. Yeast-toot bubbles. Yeah... I'm weird.

Let me show you how to raise yeast.

 1. Pick a cute jar. Important step. This jar will be your new pets' home. It must be cute.
2. Put into the jar
     1/4 package yeast
     about 1/2 cup of flour
     about 1 Tb sugar (if you want active yeast soon)
    about 1/2 cup warm water
3. Stir.
4. Let sit at room temperature until you see lots of bubbles, and the paste is doubled in size.

Now your yeast is happy and ready to use, and is equivalent to about a full package of yeast. You can put your jar of yeast into the fridge until you are ready to use it. When you want to use it, just pull it out of the fridge, stir it (it will separate a bit), and let it warm to room temperature (you will see bubbles again). Then, use in your recipe pretty much as you would packaged yeast. It may take a bit of practice to learn portions when using this as opposed to a package, but for the most part if you just substitute in a jar-full of this stuff, it works.

When you use this yeast, pour most of the jar into your recipe, leaving a small amount of paste sticking to the sides of your jar. Then, add flour and warm water again and let rise to double before putting back into your refrigerator.

In my experience, this takes just a little longer to rise than ordinary yeast, but not a whole lot longer. If it takes a really whole lot longer, then your yeasts are not happy and you need to help them... don't ask me how. My best method of yeast-rejuvenation has been to pour them out and start over. 

In a plain bread recipe, you will taste a very slight sourdough taste to the bread, which is extremely yummy. For breads like cinnamon roll dough, however, there is no added taste due to the homegrown yeast.

Since you no doubt will want to get started using your yeast right away, I will give you a basic recipe for plain french bread, which I make very often, and which gets eaten quickly. Very quickly.

 French Bread with Pet Yeast:
(2 loaves)
Ingredients:
yeast (about 1/2 cup)
3 c flour
warm water
salt
olive oil

Pour yeast into mixing bowl. Add about 3 cups of flour (I usually just pour in some flour till there is a little mountain of flour). Add some salt... around a teaspoon, more or less, depending on how much you like salt. Add warm water a little at a time while kneading it until you get a semi-stiff dough. This will be around 1 - 1 1/2 cups of water. About.
Knead until dough is smooth and elastic. Knead a long time. A really long time. Learn to love kneading. It's therapeutic. I learned that from my mom, who used to make bread when she was upset.
Put in a clean bowl and rub all over with olive oil. Cover with a piece of saran wrap (to keep the outside from drying out) and a kitchen towel.
Let rise to double, or until when you press your finger into the dough, it springs back very slowly.
Punch down, let rise again to double.

Now, divide dough in half and form two french loaves of bread. Long, skinny. Make them skinnier than you want them to be in the end, because they will rise again. Cut slits diagonally in the top with a sharp knife or a pair of scissors, about 1/4 inch deep. Place loaves on a cookie sheet a ways apart from each other, and cover with damp kitchen towel.
Let rise to about half-again their size.

Heat oven to 350 F. Bake bread until slightly golden, and when you tap on the crust it sounds hollow. Pull bread out, slather with butter, and eat it all with a big glass of milk. Now.

 Give us this day our daily bread, because with warm fresh bread in our tummies it is so much easier to forgive those who trespass against us.

A Cure for Hot Weather

Seedless limes were on sale at Buy-For-Less for 15 for a dollar! I bought some.
Ok, I bought lots.
My head was dancing with visions of cold, tart treats.
So I brought them home and Morgan and I started juicing... and juicing.... and juicing.... and we did not get through all the limes I bought, some of them are still sitting on my kitchen table. But we did get through enough to make yummy cold treat things!

I don't like ice cream.
I'm sorry, I know that is probably bordering on blasphemy.
But I just don't.
I don't really know why... I used to blame it on my cold-sensitive teeth, but I love sorbet and frozen yoghurt and frappaccinos, so it obviously can't be that I just don't like cold things.
I even really like homemade ice cream. And I like smoothies, and some of Dairy Queen's stuff.
It's just regular old ice cream, I just don't like it that much. Its... I don't know... too heavy? Too creamy? Too sweet? I just don't know. Too ice-creamy.
I'm sorry.
I'll go hide in a hole now so I don't get hit.

But I love sorbet! So I made some sorbet. For me. Because I like it. And because I've convinced myself that it must be healthier than ice cream. Surely. Besides, in Bethany, OK this time of year in a house without air conditioning, you really need something cold. Really.

Lime Sorbet
1 c water
1 c lime juice
1 c sugar
1 tbsp lime zest

Combine in pan, simmer over medium heat until sugar is fully dissolved.
Freeze.
You can just pour it in a bowl and set it in the freezer, and freeze it that way. I must warn you, however, that when you do this the sour tends to float to the top and the sweet will sink to the bottom somehow, so that you end up with a wow-thats-super-sour-stuff-now-my-jaw-really-hurts-a-lot first few bowls, and then oh-my-goodness-this-is-incredibly-sweet last few bowls. So if you do it like that, you may want to visit it now and again during the freezing process and stir it up.

You could also freeze it in an ice cream maker, if you have one of those.
Also, as we learned in my brother's 4th grade science class, you can freeze it by putting it in a little ziploc bag inside a bigger ziploc bag, then filling the bigger ziploc bag with ice and salt and shaking it for a while. You may, however, want to make sure your ziploc bags are well sealed before coming into your mom's office with all her paper work strewn about and demonstrating to her your science project. It might get messy otherwise. Your mom might not fully appreciate your science project. Just a guess. You know... from experience.

Sesame Chicken Noms!

I really love Chinese food.
A lot.
I could eat Chinese food and Indian food every day for the rest of my life.
For real.
And one of my favorite Chinese food dishes ever is sesame chicken.
I made sesame chicken for dinner.
It was really, really good and I ate a lot of it.
Lots and lots.
I know, I shouldn't sing my own praises and all that, but it was really good.
Really.
It made me forget that I am trying to lose weight and all that. 
You should make it too.
Right now.
Go ahead.
Here, I'll even give you a recipe. I looked up online a recipe for sesame chicken and then I kind of adapted it a lot until it looks a little like the original, but not much. So, I'll give you mine because it is good and worth eating.

Recipe: 

Ingredients: 
2 pounds of cubed chicken
1/4 c toasted sesame seeds (toast till light brown in a pan on the stove)
vegetable oil for deep frying

Batter:
4 Tbsp soy sauce
4 Tbsp flour
4 Tbsp cornstarch
4 Tbsp water
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp vegetable oil

Sauce:
1/2 c water
1 c chicken broth
1/8 c vinegar
2 Tbsp cornstarch
1 c sugar
2 Tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp chili soy sauce (or chili sauce)
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tsp sesame seeds

Method:
Mix ingredients for marinade and pour over the cubed chicken. Mix together and let this sit while you put together the sauce.

Mix together the ingredients for the sauce in a small sauce pan and bring to a boil over medium to high heat while stirring occasionally with a whisk. Let sauce thicken to syrup consistency, then set heat to very low while you fry the chicken.

Heat enough oil to deep fry chicken in a deep pan. I used my wok. Test the oil by dropping a little of the batter into it. When it sizzles a whole lot, the oil is hot enough. Drop the pieces of chicken into the oil little at a time, separating them as you drop them. Keep stirring, or they will stick to the bottom of the pan... or is that just me? When they are done (light brown, crispy) pull them out and put them in a bowl lined with paper towels to drain.

When the chicken is all fried, heat the sauce up to boiling again. Mix the fried chicken and the sauce in a bowl, then toss with all but a spoonful of the sesame seeds. Sprinkle the last few seeds over the top.

Serve with rice. Or with spaghetti noodles if you want to... personally, I recommend the rice.

Morgan approved of this sesame chicken. Or at least, I think he did, since he ate about three bowls worth.

 

Oh yeah, and I think you should eat this with chopsticks. Because I think all Chinese food should be eaten with chopsticks, with the exception, perhaps, of eggdrop soup. It just tastes better with chopsticks. Trust me. Now go make sesame chicken.

Yoghurt!

I recently found out that evidently the word "yoghurt" is not spelled the same in british and american english. Yet another example of how impeded my ability to communicate with my peers is. Yeah, you can stop talking about how much I communicate anyway. I know I talk a lot. I know.

But honestly this post is not about my tendency to not stop the flow of wisdom that proceeds forth out of my mouth, but rather about my attempts to make yoghurt. You see, it recently occurred to me that while yoghurt costs over $3 a quart, milk only costs about $3 a gallon. And I eat a lot of yoghurt. So, I thought, I could save a LOT of money by just making my own yoghurt! Well, actually, I probably would not actually save any money because I would be so much more likely to actually eat the yoghurt that I made that I would eat enough more of it to negate the fact that it cost less. Whatever. The point is, less money, more creamy tart yumminess. So I set out to find a simple way to make homemade yoghurt.

That search, while it may sound easy, is not. It is hard. Yoghurt is a thing which is shrouded in mystery, difficulty, and precise temperatures for prolonged periods of time. I do not have a) a yoghurt maker, b) a double boiler, c) a candy thermometer, or d) a heating pad thingy. It would seem that my yoghurt making ambitions were doomed. However, after much perseverance (I really like yoghurt) I finally happened upon a blog which told you how to tell when the milk and the yoghurt are the right temperature without a thermometer! With a little tweaking, the recipe worked great! My yoghurt is lovely! It is wonderful with fruit and granola in it for breakfast, and I feel oh-so-healthy as I eat it. And yes, I do eat about 4 times as much yoghurt now, which means I spend about the same amount of money on it as before, but hey, I get more of it now! =D

Ok, I'll stop talking and just show you how I make it.

You will need:
a pan
a whisk
sealable containers for your yoghurt
a blanket or several towels

milk (the amount of yoghurt you want to make, that's how much milk you need)
1/4 cup yoghurt (for your first batch. after the first batch, you can use the leftover yoghurt from your last batch)

Step 1: heat the milk in the pan, stirring lots with a whisk. Like, stir it a lot. Obsessively. Do not go do your laundry. Stay right there and stir that milk. Sometimes I wash dishes in between stirring, but mostly do stirring. Or it will burn. Yuck. Heat it until it begins to froth like that stuff you put on top of cappuccinos, and steam is coming off of it a lot.

Step 2: Now transfer the pot with the milk in it to a sink of cold water. I know, it seems weird, heat up the milk, cool the milk, but trust me it works. Promise. Continue stirring the milk, and cooling it off until you can keep your pinky finger in the milk for 10 seconds without it burning. Why? Because that's the right temperature. Just is.

Step 3: Take the pot out of the cold water and stir the yoghurt into the milk.


Step 4: Pour this warm milk-yoghurt stuff into your yoghurt containers. Make sure your containers aren't cold when you do this, they should be warm. You don't want to cool off the milky yoghurty stuff.

Step 5: Snugly wrap up your yoghurt containers in the blanket or towels and put them somewhere they will stay warm. It being Oklahoma in the summertime here, "somewhere they will stay warm" is right there on my kitchen counter. I mean, it's 105 degrees, they aren't going to cool off. You might need to find a warmer place, like near a heater.

Step 6: leave them there for about 8 hours, maybe a bit more depending on how it is doing. If it is getting thickish (it will still be pretty runny) and tart, then they are doing good.

Step 7: When they are done, take your containers out of the blanket and stir the yoghurt vigorously. You are trying to stop the bacteria activity, so it doesn't keep yoghurtifying. Then, put the containers in the fridge overnight (about 8 hours again). The yoghurt will thicken some in the fridge.

Step 8: Eat!