new things! granola and a camera

I knew it was very, very bad when I signed onto my little blog behind-the-scenes and said "that was my last post? wow, I thought I'd put up at least one post since then." Oh well, I'm finally posting, small and silly though this post will be.

For Christmas, my dear, sweet mother gave me a five minutes a day bread baking book. I know lots of people who love this book and I was delighted to finally have my own copy from which to bake delicious bread, which will, in turn, make me a rather plump little blogger. But, other than making me trade in my size smalls for mediums, this book finally, after years of reading other people's happy success stories, forced me to make my own granola. This is something my mother has always done, from the time I was little but I've always thought it seemed a fairly fussy process for granola that rarely tastes better than what can be purchased out of the bulk bins at the natural foods store.

While skimming the recipes in this book, I came across the recipe that my mother and my brother's girlfriend, Elizabeth, have been raving about for the past year. They love this granola and make and eat it all the time to the point that Elizabeth gave lovely little tins of it to people for Christmas. Luckily for Matthew and I, we were included in the granola crowd and received our very own tin, full to the brim with the luscious stuff. It is really, truly the best granola I've eaten and the only way to have any is to make it. For once, I can't buy a better granola in the store. (And, honestly, I know I'm years behind on "discovering" this book and all of it's much beloved recipes. That's what happens when one lives in a dark, dank little bat cave such as Matthew and I do.)



I will say this for my first batch, I may have over cooked it. In fact, I'm sure I over cooked it; the truth is, I'm forever over cooking things because I often forget that many things are in fact better when slightly undercooked than when over cooked. In addition to over cooking the granola, I, in my usual fashion, forgot what I'd read (I did read the recipe through. twice!), and added the dried fruit at the beginning before cooking everything when in fact I was supposed to add them to the already cooked and cooled granola. The fruit is still edible, but I will say that this was a slight tragedy because some of the fruit I used were incredibly scrumptious, little, tart, dried cherries that my crazy(in the very best of ways), but kind neighbor foisted upon me. It didn't take much cajoling to get me to take as many of the little treasures as he was willing to give me. Fortunately for me, I still have lots of dried cherries left and will make a much better batch of granola in the near future.

By the way, you may notice that the photos of the granola are of a slightly higher quality than I usually post on my blog, or you may not. I, in fact, have a terrible eye for such things and can't tell at all that they are better. But be that as it may, we still purchased a new, fancy-dan camera that takes, supposedly, incredibly better photos for only many hundreds of dollars more than the one I usually use. My main complaint about the new camera(which I secretly love and adore) is that it isn't pink! so sad! pink should be a standard color for all cameras. But this last paragraph just shows what a little philistine I really am.


The front and back. It's rather small for a dslr.