Some, but not nearly all, of the ingredients: walnuts, hazelnuts, cinnamon stick, ground ginger, sesame seeds, a vanilla bean.
Friday night is usually craft night at my house, and last night we made granola.
I like making things from scratch because then you know exactly what’s in them and you can doctor them to suit your flavor prefs. Lately I have been obsessed with the tiny little seeds from inside expensive dried vanilla beans — my friend Sachie, who is herself an incredible baker, tells me they are called “caviar.” It’s an apt name because they are tiny and precious and maybe just a little ridiculous to bother with.
To get them out of the vanilla bean, you have to slice the unruly bean lengthwise, split it open, and scrape them out carefully with a tiny coke spoon or, perhaps more conveniently and depending on your lifestyle, the back of a knife. Adding vanilla seeds to anything you cook adds a whole new level of flavor you just can’t get with vanilla extract — which is alcohol-based, so naturally has a different, more canned flavor.
Trying to coax the vanilla caviar out of its shell.
I’ve used plenty of granola recipes, and this one from Bon Appetit is my current favorite. It’s simpler than some of the rull bohemian recipes I’ve tried and it includes whipped egg whites, which make it better because… well, I have no idea why. But it does.
Bake and stir and bake and stir and bake and stir and bake.
The best part of any project, of course, is the packaging, and thanks to my cursed Amazon Prime account, I found these crazy cute bags:
