Apparently eating breakfast every day is good for you. I wake up in a vague stupor that is barely nudged out of the way by stovetop espresso (no Nescafe here, natch, I’m a postgrad!) so I find breakfast eating a total drag. Pancakes are great and all but not really suitable for everyday consumption unless you have lots of time every morning and have no problem with living in elasticated pants. I gave up on eating toast as it usually happened in the car and I’d get messy and have to stash a toothbrush in my office. As a kid the only cereal my parents could force down me was muesli (I lived in a no sugar on your weetbix household, gross), and so it remains today.
Most bought cereals are full of all sorts of crap or, in the case of one that rhymes with Must Bite, made up of the floor sweepings and dregs left over from other cereals. By making your own muesli you can ensure that you’re not eating rejects for breakfast, while also tailoring it to your particular taste and budget. Nuts and the like are very expensive, but can be replaced with things like seeds and fruit, or you could go all ascetic and have nothing extra at all. Making this sort of thing in quantity still works out significantly cheaper than bought stuff, and if you’re well prepared you can cook it whilst using the oven to cook dinner or bake. You can also experiment with different juices and spices – ginger, lemon, dried cranberry and yoghurt covered raisin muesli? Goodbye, Mr Hubbard, I have a new breakfast boyfriend, and have spent all my student allowance on dried fruit.
Addendum: you may have noticed that the layout fairies have been doing funny things to some of the recipes – for instance, you actually have to cook banana bread, and you don’t need 13 cups of milk to make pancakes. For full, accurate recipes, go to my blog – uckai.blogspot.com – and avert culinary disaster.
An incredibly inexact recipe for toasted muesli
- A roasting dish – eg a 9x12” one, the sort the supermarket sells
- Oats
- Coconut
- Nuts of your choosing: slivered almonds, chopped peanuts, hazelnuts, etc – but not walnuts, they burn
- Seeds of your choosing: sunflower, sesame, pumpkin, linseed
- Honey or golden syrup
- Oil (canola, vegetable)
- An orange
- Cinnamon
- Dried fruit of your choosing: raisins, sultanas, chopped apricots, chopped dates
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C. Fill the roasting dish one third full with the oats. Add a few handfuls of coconut and your nuts and seeds – but you don’t want to fill the dish more than just over half full. Grate the zest off the orange and add to the oats. Chop the orange in half and squeeze over the juice. Add a liberal tablespoonful of cinnamon.
Pour about 75 ml oil and 75ml honey / syrup into a glass bowl or jug. Microwave it very slowly (eg in 10 second bursts) until it is warm enough to combine with a stir. Pour it evenly over the muesli and stir it about until everything is coated evenly. Bake in the oven, stirring every 5 – 10 minutes to let it cook evenly. Keep an eye on it otherwise it will burn. When the muesli is turning a lovely golden colour, remove it from the oven and let it cool – don’t let it go too far or you’ll break a tooth when you come to eat it. When it is cold, stir through the dried fruit and store it in an airtight container.
A word about being flexible: this is a very inaccurate recipe because I am firmly of the belief that if you follow the recipe correctly every time, nothing interesting happens. A friend of mine can’t deal with things if she is missing just one ingredient in a recipe, but substitutions make for wonderful and sometimes bizarre surprises, and stop you from going back to the supermarket and ‘accidentally’ buying $10 worth of ice cream. Become at one with your kitchen and develop your pantry ninja skills, you can usually make do.
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