This is my breakfast for most of the year
Why aren't we all making granola? A *very* easy multi-plant recipe
This essay is part of the You Can Do This series where I share empowering and practical how to guides that will hopefully help you acquire a new lifelong skill.
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In today’s column I’m sharing the recipe for the breakfast I eat for most of the year.
I make a batch of this granola once a month, it’s ridiculously easy to make, takes just 20 mins of prep, contains at least 16 different plants and is so much cheaper and better than any shop bought granola I have tried.
March 2024 update: since first publishing this piece, many readers now regularly make this granola and have told me they are never going back to shop bought again. This delights me so very much.
Feedback is really important. So if you enjoy reading this article, I encourage you to let me know by hitting the heart icon and sharing this piece to spread the word. Thank you.
As always thank you for being here and I hope you enjoy this post!
Have I mentioned this is not a food newsletter?
Back when I started this newsletter on 1st June 2023 I was adamant it wasn’t going to be a food and / or travel newsletter, despite those two things being what my day job is centred around (see opening lines to this post above).
Travel and food are two of my greatest passions, but I don’t spend the entirety of my day-to-day existence just eating or gallivanting. There is a lot more to me beyond these two topics, much of which I have only discovered myself over the past decade. It’s these things I strive to share in this newsletter.
Plus, I am no recipe developer. I am someone who likes to follow other people’s awesome recipes.
No one needed another Substack recipe blog when there are so many amazing writers already doing just that and far better than I ever could (here are a few of my favourites:
, , , )That being said, food and travel are so integral to what’s important to me that they will always occasionally feature in this newsletter. I’ve so far shared a few travel pieces (Lisbon, Cork and Tuscany), but not yet any recipe type food ones.
So I figured it was about time I did.
The foods I regularly eat
The way I like to eat at home is with a plant slant (I’m not vegetarian but I don’t often cook meat), by incorporating as many different plants into my diet as possible and by making many of the foods you would normally find readymade in the shops.
I try to eat as little ultra-processed food1 as possible which means making a lot of things from scratch, from my bread to my breakfast to my biscuits (cookies, for my American readers!).
There are a few recipes I keep returning to in the kitchen (and by this I mean returning regularly - these are the things I tend to consume multiple times a week) and for them to achieve this staple status, they need to meet 3 criteria:
Taste great
Be good for me and make me feel good
Be easy to make
And I think these are going to be the recipes I occasionally share with you here on A Day Well Spent. Starting with my granola recipe, which is what I have for breakfast for most of the year.
I’ve flown this granola across the Atlantic Ocean
It contains at least 16 different plants2, has barely any added sugar, is completely delicious and is so ridiculously easy to make that once I started doing so, I was up in arms:
‘Do people know how simple this is? Why aren’t we all making our own granola? How is there even a market for this stuff when it’s this easy to make?!’
This is the same granola I made 3kg / 6.6lbs of, packed into my suitcase and took all the way to Colombia last winter where I ate it pretty much every morning during the 6 weeks I was there.
I also took my kefir grains with me in a little plastic pot with a splash of milk as part of my permitted hand luggage liquids, so I could continue making kefir whilst there.
These are the extents I am happy to go to in order to ensure I’m getting a wholesome, botanically diverse, homemade and nutritious daily breakfast. What I eat is very important to me.
Photo of my well travelled granola and homemade kefir with a Colombian lulo fruit.
Why would you want to make your own granola when you can just buy it?
It’s a fair question. Let’s address it.
Buying good granola is not cheap
Compared to your average cereal, granola is a better breakfast option because it generally contains more plants, is more nutrient dense, contains less artificial ingredients and sugar, and is less processed.
Sure, you can buy some quite posh granola in the shops with ingredients like chicory root that sound exotic enough to make the £4.00 price tag for a measly 300g feel warranted. But that is an expensive way to eat breakfast.
And if you want to buy organic granola, you might as well take out a second mortgage.
The granola I make is organic because the raw ingredients I put in it are organic. I buy these organic ingredients in larger quantities which means they work out as good value for money – I’ll share my favoured suppliers further down (you can of course make your granola not organic which will cost even less).
For example, I have just searched for ‘granola’ on the UK health food shop Holland & Barrett website and here is an example of one for sale at £6.50 for 300g, the most expensive listed.
The ingredients are absolutely nothing special and only contain 6 plants: almonds, coconut, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, hazelnuts, coconut oil, some sweetener.
£6.50 for this little bag - that is a bloody lot! It’s not even organic. Yet people are buying it3 (seriously who is paying this amount for granola?).
You could make the thing yourself with the exact same ingredients for so much less.
My point being, if you can easily make something yourself that will also be more suited to your specific tastes and work out a lot less per bowl, why wouldn’t you?
Making your own food is empowering
My default response to many of the tangible and material things I come across in life is ‘I’m pretty sure I could just do / make that myself’ (which is closely linked to why it takes a lot for me to part with my money, something I wrote about in why I really, really don’t like shopping).
I talked about this in a piece I wrote called the power of self-reliance (and why we need to stop outsourcing our lives) where I introduced a regular feature of practical and self-empowering how to guides on A Day Well Spent. Today’s post is one of these guides.
In that piece I write:
Acquiring the skill and knowledge to be able to do something for yourself is hugely empowering and freeing. If your usual response to something someone else has done or achieved is ‘Oh, I could never do that’, I’m here to tell you, you can do this.
I know we’re only talking about making granola here, not building your own house or planting a forest. But it’s kind of amazing the sense of satisfaction, achievement and food security I feel when I fill a big glass jar with wholesome, nutritious, organic food that I haven’t relied on anyone else to make.
It’s a sense of ‘Nestlé / Unilever / Danone [insert mega global food company of your choice here] hasn’t provided my breakfast for the next several weeks; I’ve provided for myself, thanks very much.’
I reckon the more middle men you can remove from your food equation, the better the food is for you and the better it tastes.
My extremely easy at-least-16-plants granola recipe
And so here’s my granola recipe which I eat for my weekday breakfast for most of the year.
The quantities in this recipe make approximately 1kg / 2.2lbs of granola which will roughly fill a jar the size of the main image. If you have 60g / 2.1oz a day (as I do), that’s around 18 portions.
If you want to make more, just scale up the ingredients and find a bigger storage container - it won’t add any additional time to the process.
It’s also worth mentioning that on the days I don’t have this granola for breakfast, I become hungrier a fair bit sooner than on the days I do; I found this notable difference quite startling to be honest.
I make a batch of this once a month, it takes just 20 mins of prep and it contains at least 16 different plants. A very small investment of time for a wholesome, nutritious and homemade meal that requires zero effort each morning and sets me up for the day ahead.