Chocolate Almond Granola

What do you struggle with in raising your littles? If I boiled down my biggest hurdles, they are: worry with one kid and disappointment with the other. Esme frets about what’s coming and Julian stomps around about what’s already happened. But really, it’s all about control, right? How do you teach your kids to manage what they can and forget about the things they can’t. I guess you start by teaching yourself. Wow, who woke up feeling philosophical? My six a.m. runs are clearly fuelling some deep thoughts…

Cooking and food are great parallels to life challenges, don’t you find? If I’m looking for a way to tell my kids about frustrations or problem solving in my life, I don’t have to look much further than the kitchen. Take this granola for example. It started out as granola bars. I’d been researching easy, simple bars for weeks and had my mind set on these. The internet is packed with recipes for 5-ingredient bars and this is a riff on those recipes. I had my plan and I was all set for a studio day with our lovely photographer Maya Visnyei. Those shoot days take a lot of preparation, shopping, cooking, packing, thinking through prop ideas, etc. I like to go into the day feeling like I know exactly what I’m going to do. You can see where this is going, right?

I baked these bars the night before the shoot and wrapped them up, ready to go for the following morning. Of course the kids were poking around when they saw them on the counter at breakfast. I decided I could just cut a sliver off an end – both to give them a taste and to even up the edge of my bars. And…. no dice. The knife cracked and crumbled the bars as soon as it touched the top. I tried again as the kids watched. Hunks of granola were breaking and scattering everywhere. Julian looked up at me. “Is that wrong, Mummy?” “Nope,” I answered. “It’s granola.” And that’s what we’ve got here – these bars are not bars at all. I should have known – the batter was nowhere near as sticky as the other granola bars I make. But it makes a damn fine granola. And I’m just fine with that.