Gothic Granola

OMG! It's a hippie lentil loaf! Miriam at Mouthwatering Vegan created this Epic Veggie Loaf . I have nothing to add other than my substitutions:

Regular Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal is not vegan and gluten-free. HOWEVER, Van's makes a reasonably close VGF alternative, Cinnamon Heaven . I reviewed this cereal last year. TC challenged me to make a coffee cake with cinnamon toast crunch. Pinterest yielded several recipes, precious few from scratch. For my junior paper on diets and religion, I picked up a series of essays on women and food, and I recall one that was elaborating on why women in the '50s felt pressured to "do it all": keeping the perfect house, dressing neatly, managing the children, and making dinners with all the new electric gadgets and convenience foods. That drive to use convenience foods is why I find some 1950's cookbooks gross (et tu, ridiculous Sunset cookbook in my grandparents' home library). I think the essay was from this book?

Before I had my licence/parents would let me drive, for the super-early National Honor Society morning meetings, Ownie Mom would drive me to school. As usual, she gave me breakfast: a thermos of Earl Grey tea, a pot of Stonyfield Farms organic, low-fat yoghurt (chocolate please!), maybe an apple, and a bag of enhanced trail mix. Trail mix with more stuff became my vice in later years: GORP, M'n'Ms, peanutbutter-filled pretzels, and Quaker Oatmeal Squares. Of course I ate it to stay awake in 2006-2008. I made it for myself and ate it to fill some hunger for the same love and care for my success in 2009-2010.

This blog post is dedicated to the awesome blog that is no more, "Option Pitch and Waffle Crisp" and its intrepid author.

Sacrifice II My mother would be proud of me. This recipe contains chocolate chips. In the words of one of my fellow team members, “Is it going to be healthy, or good?” when I described the recipe I was going to present for yesterday’s Foodie Call. I remade the cereal bars I made last year for my friend Liz’s Fourth of July shindig . Calling them “Sacrifice to the Gods of Freedom and Democracy” would probably turn off most folk. Here is my recipe for the huge batch (three sheet pans!) of “Trail Treats.” You can customise the crunchy bits and trail mix to your heart’s content.

This is the 179th blog post on Gothic Granola, formerly Screwfoot Q. It's time to make a 180 degree turn on some issues.

Rule number one of being vegan and gluten-free: always bring your own snacks.

Instead of chocolate chips in your breakfast, have some raw cacao nibs: crunchy, tasty antioxidants!   Instead of riding the white sugar roller coaster from some cookie-lookalike cereal, enjoy a chocolate-oat-nut mélange that will power you through the morning or the rest of your workday, if you’re like me and enjoy granola for lunch a few times a week.

On Tuesday, one of my bestest buds from high school invited me to a Fourth of July party in D.C. and she requested that I bring “some food or drink to placate the gods of freedom and democracy.”  However, I couldn’t use the stove since the gas burners have electric starters.  As with  this episode last year , I took the Metro to my brother’s apartment in order to sleep and make cereal bars.

For a gift for a friend’s birthday, I halved the original recipe for Ranger Cookies.

I am officially no longer defined by my secondary education!  Says me.  Only while driving home from school on Tuesday after graduation did I realise that I have the rest of my life ahead of me.  Yes, I realise there are a tonne of linguistic and logical pitfalls in that statement and I have my education to thank for recognising that.  Sigh.  Three clichés: the mind is a terrible thing to waste/too much education can be a bad thing/ too much work and too little play makes Q a dull cat. Train Wreck Granola Like the great train crash at Crush , I ran three granola recipes together since I wanted to make granola and to use up some two-year-old candied ginger.  The ginger is as old as the length of time I’ve worked at my former student job; it’s been frozen more or less continuously since then. Works consulted: Erin McKenna, “Granola,” in Babycakes Covers the Classics: Gluten-free Vegan Recipes from Donuts to Snickerdoodles (New York: Clarkson ...

Why is there an egg in the original recipe for “Banana-Flax Breakfast Muffins?”  The recipe has a quarter cup of ground flaxseed, which is equivalent to 4 eggs in the vegan baking world.  The egg  seems to add only unnecessary cholesterol since the chemical leaveners and buttermilk and flaxseed do an excellent job of leavening and binding, effectively replacing the role of an egg.  Furthermore,  why is there 1 cup of sugar in  breakfast  muffins?  Bananas are naturally sweet; they really don’t need the help.

Burny fingers and muffins don't go well together, kids. Pro Tip: store your cooling rack somewhere other than under your oven. Why is there an egg in the original recipe for “Banana-Flax Breakfast Muffins?”  The recipe has a quarter cup of ground flaxseed, which is equivalent to 4 eggs in the vegan baking world.  The egg  seems to add only unnecessary cholesterol since the chemical leaveners and buttermilk and flaxseed do an excellent job of leavening and binding, effectively replacing the role of an egg.  Furthermore,  why is there 1 cup of sugar in  breakfast  muffins?  Bananas are naturally sweet; they really don’t need the help.