Hello chaps and chapettes

It’s Friday, Footloose is on rather loudly on an Amazon 80s floorfillers in the lounge. I’m fighting the urge to dance around to it and instead write a few lines on the beautiful granola I made today. It’s based on the toasted buckwheat and coconut granola recipe in Deliciously Ella with Friends book but I’ve changed a few things about it. I can wholeheartedly recommend the book though. It’s crammed full of healthy brekkies and sides that even a rather reluctantly healthy person like me loves. The best thing about this recipe is that there are no hard and fast rules. If you have no buckwheat grouts, which I didn’t the first time, just use oats instead or if you have no coconut chips, just add up the weight with dessicated coconut. Just mind it in the oven as it burns easily. So, here goes:

Heat your oven to 160 (a little higher for non-fan)

Put 200g of buckwheat grouts (I searched for these all over Hastings to no avail but found them at Ocado in the end), 100g of oats, 30g of coconut chips, 30g of dessicated coconut, 50 g of sunflower seeds and 100 g of pumpkin seeds in a bowl and mix it up a bit. If you like you can add some chopped nuts too, or if you don’t want them toasted you can add them at the end.

In a pan, melt 3 tablespoons of coconut oil and mix in 3 tsps of ground cinnamon, 5 tsps of ground ginger, 2 tsps of vanilla powder or the seeds from one pod (being swedish I used swedish vanilla sugar, see below) and 3 tablespoons honey. Keep stirring this until it’s all melted and mixed, then pour over the buckwheat mix and use your hands to mix it around a bit but be careful because the melted oil mix gets a little hot.

Then empty the bowl into an oven tray and level out. Put into oven for 10-15 minutes but keep an eye on it because the coconut chips tend to burn rather easily. Take it out of the oven and stir it around. Return to the oven for 7-12 minutes whilst still keeping an eye on it.

Take it out of the oven, and once it’s cooled down properly you can add dried fruit to your hearts content. I’ve added raisins and dried cranberries, but you can add anything you like. Store in an airtight container and enjoy.

Now, I mentioned Swedish vanilla sugar and once you start using it you will never look back. A teaspoon of it lifts whipped cream to a new height and I add it to cakes and biscuits and it’s a smell I remember from my childhood because my mother’s kitchen cupboard always smelled of vanilla. The funny thing is that I’d forgotten all about it until I bought some and smelled it in my own cupboard. The brand I grew up with, and have always used, is Fazer, but I think there is another one around these days. It’s a little difficult for me to keep up these things as I left Sweden many moons ago and I don’t return as often as I like. Now, this vanilla sugar is not the easiest thing to get hold of outside Scandinavia and if you do find it (swedish online shops like Scandi Kitchen and Totally Swedish) it tends to be quite expensive, but I found a blog some months ago, and I can’t for the life of me remember who by, but they said to open up a couple of vanilla pods, put them in a jar and cover with icing sugar and put the lid back on. After a couple of days you will have a lovely smelling vanilla sugar. This is what I’ve done and I must admit that I prefer the shop bought version, but if you can’t get hold of that, this works very well too.

So, I hope you try this and have a fabulous weekend.

Marie

xx