Moving Overseas Preparation: I must cook!
With our appointment at the Spanish consulate coming up soon, I’ve started realizing we need to clear out our pantry. The bottle of rose water has been used up by this fabulous recipe from Yotem Ottolenghi, and this morning I made a final batch of muesli to use up the remaining oats in the pantry.
When people say cooking is hard and they don’t know how to do it, I cringe. A steady diet of convenience food advertising has done a great job of convincing many people that cooking is difficult and inconvenient, but really, it’s not. The secret to good cooking (well, one of many secrets) is that fabulous food can be simple to make so great flavor does not require great difficulty. Thus the Moving Overseas Muesli:
Moving Overseas Muesli
Preheat the oven to 375 and gather a couple baking sheets.
Gather up whatever yummy meusli ingredients are sitting in the pantry. You’ll need oats as the base (we use Bob’s Red Mill Extra Thick Rolled Oats*), then I gathered up the odds and ends we need to use up. That was some whole almonds (unsalted - that’s important to take in to account, more on that down below), pumpkin seeds (also unsalted), dried apricots, and dried cherries.
3. Gather some spices to blend in for more flavor: I pulled cinnamon, ground cardamom, French four spice mix (white pepper, nutmeg, ginger, cloves), and a salt blend with Meyer lemon and pink peppercorn from Austin Texas-based Confituras (Their jam is unworldly. You must buy some.). This is why I mentioned above it’s important to take in to account whether you are adding salted items: you may not want to mix in extra salt if that is the case. But I like a bit of salt to offset the sweetness of the fruits and spices. And again, this is not prescriptive. These are just what happen to be in our pantry and need to be used up. Blend to your own likes and dislikes.
4. By now the oven should be preheated. Spread the oats out on the baking sheets and stick them in the oven. Let them toast till they get a little brown. Again this is up to you, how toasted do you want them? Just check every couple minutes till they are to your liking.
5. Sprinkle your spice mix over the oats. I also sprinkled coconut flakes over them, as we had some around, but they aren’t necessary. Keep in mind the coconut will burn very quickly, so at this point, keep a steady eye on them. Once the spice mix is smelling fragrant, or the coconut is barely brown, pull the sheets out. Don’t forget to turn off the oven!
6. Depending on how big your dried fruits are, you may want to chop them up. Up to you though.
7. Mix everything together.
8. Done.
Additional secrets of cooking this recipe illustrates are:
For easy, everyday cooking, look for recipes like this one that have a lot of flexibility. So long as you have oats, some spices, and some nuts or dried fruits, you can make this. If a recipe requires hours of work, a trip to the store for ingredients, yadda yadda yadda, it simply isn’t going to get done on a whim. This is the secret - find recipes you can make on a whim.
Be mindful of salt use. Not purely as a health concern, but as a don’t-make-it-too-salty concern. Had I used salted almonds and pumpkin seeds, I would not have added the extra salt.
You’re cooking for YOU. So put in the stuff YOU like. Make your own spice blend, or throw in different dried fruits. Throw in banana chips…. or like I usually do, throw in some cacao nibs with the coconut and let them get toasty too. But today we had no cacao nibs on hand so there were none in this batch.
Enjoy!
*We don’t get any kind of kickback or whatever from mentioning a specific brand or product. If we mention it, it’s solely because we like it.