A granola bar

We eat a lot of oats around here. In fact, I just searched through my email receipts so that I could give you some sort of number, and it turns out we eat about 60 pounds of oats, just the two of us, every year. Hoo-ey!

Mostly, we eat them for breakfast. I buy them from Maine, online from a farm called Wood Prairie Farm in Bridgewater, and they are organic and Maine-grown and make top-notch homemade granola. But thanks to my sister [hi Anna!], we have now found a new all-day snacking use for them, and between that and the baby, I predict our annual consumption will soon be in the high eighties. Please, no crop failures.

So, what is that beauty up there? That is one of the Granola Bars with Chocolate featured in the New York Times article that Anna sent me last week. It is also addictive, and not entirely healthy, but also not entirely unhealthy. The bars are made up mostly of oats, but also of butter and honey and dark chocolate. They hold up the way a granola bar should—they're chewy but not hard, they don't fall apart—and they have a hint of cinnamon and a dash of vanilla. In short, they are absolutely lovely.

I should have noticed them earlier, since the paper pulled the base recipe from a cookbook I have and love—Kim Boyce's Good to the Grain—but her version recommended dried fruit instead of chocolate. What can I say? Chocolate gets my attention.

GRANOLA BARS WITH CHOCOLATE

Alex says these are too chocolately. That phrase really isn't in my vocabulary, but if you're not a chocolate person, try making these with dried fruit instead. Oh! and a note about the wheat bran: the NYT recipe uses flaxseed meal, and the headnote in Kim Boyce's original says you can also use wheat germ. I just used coarsely ground wheat from our grain CSA.

3 tablespoons butter

2 cups rolled oats

1/2 cup wheat bran

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup honey

2 tablespoons brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 cup dark chocolate chips (I like Ghiradelli's 60% Cacao Bittersweet Chips)

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F. Grease an 8" by 8" glass or metal baking pan.

Melt the butter in a wide saucepan over medium heat. Add the oats and cook, stirring frequently, until the grains are lightly toasted—about 8 minutes. Be careful not to let them burn—they should smell toasty and should be, in Kim's words, about two shades darker. Turn off the heat and spoon the oats into a mixing bowl.

Wipe the pan clean and add the honey, brown sugar, and vanilla. Bring the mixture to a boil over medium heat and keep it at a gentle bubble for 5 minutes. Pour this syrup over the oats and stir well. Let the mixture cool for 5 minutes, then stir in the chocolate chips.

Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and spread it evenly. Bake the bars for 20 minutes, taking care not to let them brown or they'll get hard instead of chewy. Let them cool completely; then cut them into squares and store in an airtight container.

A batch, maybe two

I'm not quite sure where to start today, so why don't we just dive right in?

Here's the news from my end: it's March, and my mother's birthday is in a few days, and hey, I made a batch of scones and they were good! Delicious, even. Here's their before shot:

I found the recipe over at 101 Cookbooks, when I was looking through the archives the other day. The scones came originally from a cookbook called My Nepenthe by Romney Steele, and this morning, they seemed like just the thing to ward off yet another day of gray. The original version called for currants, but I had a bag of dried cranberries I'd picked up from Crow Farm in Sandwich lying around, and so I swapped those in instead. The oat/orange zest/cranberry combination proved just right—a little bit hearty, a little bit sweet, a little bit tart, and a big hit. I ate one right out of the oven, took a half hour break, and dug in again. They have a nice crumb—moist and big, and a little bit chewy—and the oat flavor is there, subtle, just underneath the citrus. The cranberries add tang and chew—for everyone's good, Alex had better come home and claim some soon.

I can't stay much longer—there are, after all, still bowls and whisks and spatulas to be scrubbed and a dog that's very anxious for a walk—but I wanted to pop in and tell you to make a batch, maybe two.

CRANBERRY ORANGE ZEST OAT SCONES

This recipe is adapted from this recipe over at 101 Cookbooks. One thing to note is that the scones are very large—like those you might find at a commercial bakery. If you like smaller ones for home consumption, divide the dough into two balls before you pat it into discs. Then cut each disc into sixths instead of eighths.

1 and 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 and 1/2 cups whole wheat flour

1/2 cup light brown sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 sticks cold butter, cut into small pieces

2 cups rolled oats

zest of 1 orange

2/3 cup dried cranberries

1 cup buttermilk (or almost 1 cup milk with a dollop of plain yogurt in it)

1/4 cup coarse sugar, for sprinkling

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Whisk together the flour, brown sugar, baking powder, and baking soda in a large mixing bowl. Cut in the butter and mix using a pastry cutter, until the butter is in small, pea-sized bits. Add the oats, orange zest, and cranberries. Pour in the buttermilk and stir until the dough is just moist.

Use your hands to bring the dough together. If it is still too crumbly, add more buttermilk a splash at a time until it comes together.

Working on a cutting board or piece of parchment paper, turn out the dough and pat it into an 8-inch round. Cut the round in half and then into quarters and finally into eighths, so that it forms 8 wedged triangle shapes. Use a spatula to transfer the scones to the prepared baking sheet, and sprinkle the top of each one with the coarse sugar. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, or until the bottoms are golden and the scones are cooked through.

A lot of breads

Uh, hi! I know we've been doing a lot of breads around here lately, but I'm not ready to stop. I'm sorry. If you're in more of a vegetable mood, I won't be offended if you go over and poke around over here, or maybe over here. It's just that with all the local grains from our CSA, we're on kind of a bread kick around here. There's something about grinding our own grains and then baking with them that we can't get enough of. Next up, oatmeal sandwich bread, from Good to the Grain.

This is a truly multi-grain bread—part whole wheat, part all-purpose, and part rolled oats. It's amazing—you put a cup of oats into two loaves of bread, and when you bake them, you get all of their sweetness but none of their texture. Do they just melt? Does the yeast eat them? I have no idea. But I like the fact that even though they dissolve, their essence is there. It reminds me of the feeling I get when I look at recipes written out in my great-grandmother's handwriting. We've never met, but I know she's in there.

Anyway, it's also a fairly easy bread. Like all bread this one takes time—a half hour rest, an hour rise, another rise and forty minutes in the oven at the end—but this time of year, between the cold and the dark, time is what we've got. And the end result—two loaves that actually bloom up, out of the pan—is well worth any scrimping and pinching you might have had to do to come up with the window.

OATMEAL SANDWICH BREAD

This recipe is adapted slightly from the one Kim Boyce lays out in Good to the Grain on page 130. As you might guess, it is a nice soft loaf, and perfect for sandwiches. I find it also makes excellent toast.

E.H. note 11.26.12: I made this bread yesterday with all spelt flour, and it turned out beautifully. 

2 cups warm water

1 tablespoon (1 package) active dry yeast

3 tablespoons honey

2 and 1/2 cups whole wheat flour

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup rolled oats

4 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled

1 tablespoon kosher salt

Grease a large bowl and two bread loaf pans. Set aside.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, stir together the water, yeast, and honey with a wooden spoon. Let sit for 5 minutes to proof.

When the yeast is bubbly, use the spoon to stir in the flours, oats, and butter. Cover this mixture with a damp dishtowel and let it sit for 30 minutes.

Attach the bread hook to the mixer. Add the salt and mix on medium speed for 5 minutes. Stay close-by and watch the process carefully; you want the dough to slap the sides of the bowl, not stick to them. If it starts to stick at any time sprinkle in a few spoonfuls of flour.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface, knead it a few times, then transfer it to the buttered bowl. Cover the bowl with a damp dishtowel, put it in a warm place, and leave the dough to rise until doubled in size, about an hour.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and divided it into two balls. Gently shape each ball into a rectangle, and place it in the buttered pans. Cover the pans with a damp dishtowel and let the bread rise in a warm place a second time, until doubled in size.

Near the end of the rise, preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Sprinkle the tops of the loaves with rolled oats and bake for 40 minutes, or until the top of the loaves are a deep golden brown and sound hollow when tapped.

Better news today

I have much, much better news for you today. I tried another experiment with an unusual ingredient, but this time, it was edible. Not just edible, in fact, but dare I say, delicious. And just the thing when the weather at the beach is looking very un-summery, like this:

This time, it was oat groats I was trying to tame. If the name makes you giggle, well, it does the same thing to me. Every time I hear it I think of some old man of the forest tending goats, which is very much not the picture you should be getting. In reality, oat groats look much more like dark, wild rice.

They also (and this still seems to me almost too good to be true, so I'm sending you a imaginary drum roll as I type) taste like rice. And act like rice. And chew like rice. And do just about every other thing rice does, except have to be cooked with the lid on, and grown far away. The only real difference is they cook like oats, with plenty of water and stirring, which is just fine with me. Better, really, for those of us who like to peek.

But the most exciting thing of all that is they came from as close as Maine. This is much, much closer than any rice I've found, so I think that fact in and of itself deserves a big hurray. While they're not quite rice—they get a little stickier around the edges, because of the stirring I think—they're awfully close. They're good with a stir fry on top, or in soups, or even (!) in rice pudding.

This last fact I discovered late last night, after a somewhat blah Monday. I was rustling around in the kitchen, and talking with my mother on the phone, and sort of wishing I were still on last week's vacation, sitting in my parents' kitchen in Maine. I was picturing the scene in my head, my mother rummaging through her recipe box, my father studying his wine chart at the counter, the fishmonger pointing out a vintage here, shaking his head there. It all seemed very far away.

And then I remembered. There would be a rice pudding recipe on that counter, floating around, talked about, but never made.


My father had made it once, last year, the night before we'd arrived on another visit. My mother'd had a particular hankering, and we'd shown up, after dark and hungry, and just in time to demolish the leftovers. It had been a rich, creamy pudding, flecked with raisins and topped with a perfectly sumptuous meringue, and with us it had lasted mere minutes, at most.

Yesterday, that was true again. Only this time we made it with oat groats, and a little bit survived until lunch. But after that, the pan was clean, and that was only with two of us. I'd hate to imagine the damage a family of five or six could claim.

OAT GROAT PUDDING WITH MERINGUE

A quick note about puddings and custards and ice creams with egg yolks, before you dive in. When you make anything like this, it involves tempering the egg yolks and a thickener (like cornstarch or flour) with the hot milk before simply adding the egg mixture in. If the milk is too hot, the yolks will burn and separate into little chunks, rather than getting creamy and smooth. If it's too cold, the only thing that will happen is nothing much at all. It simply won't get thick until everything gets much hotter.

If the milk and eggs are boiling and still the mixture isn't getting thick, try the process again. Whisk another egg yolk or two with a good dose of cornstarch or flour, temper them again, and add them in. This will almost always do the trick, and in most cases doesn't change the flavor much. Good luck!

2 cups cooked oat groats
2 cups milk
4 eggs, separated
1/4 cup cornstarch
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
dried cranberries, optional

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Combine rice and milk in a heavy-bottomed saucepan, and heat to the scalding point. (The milk should begin to steam, but not quite boil.) In a medium mixing bowl, beat egg yolks with 1/2 cup of the sugar and the cornstarch. When the milk is hot, add a bit of it, whisking constantly, to the egg mixture to temper it. Then pour the eggs and milk back into the saucepan, and continue whisking over medium heat. After a minute or two (depending on how hot the milk is), the mixture should thicken into a custardy pudding-like state. If not, use more egg yolks and cornstarch, and try again.

Turn the heat off, stir in the vanilla and dried cranberries if desired, and in a large mixing bowl beat the egg whites and sugar into a meringue (Egg whites should be stiff and glossy. If they're not getting there, try adding a pinch of cream of tartar). Pour the pudding into a greased custard pan, and spread the meringue over top. Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes, or until meringue is golden brown. Enjoy hot.

P.S. Don't worry. I put yesterday's naughty cookies out to think about what they'd done. And then it snowed, which melted into a cold, wet puddle. I think they've learned their lesson. Next time, I have a feeling they'll be plain.

Austerity & sweets

The fishmonger sees the muesli as an act of desperation. It's that bad, already? he asks. No fresh apples? No pears?

I'm sure they still have apples up at Crow Farm, I reassure him, though I believe we've seen the last of the pears. There are still two quince sitting on our kitchen counter, and a freezer full of blueberries, strawberries, applesauce and more lies in wait beneath the floorboards.

No, I inform him, some of us happen to like muesli. Muesli is, in fact, one of my favorite breakfasts—dry oats and fruit softening beneath the creamy weight of a bowl of milk, the austerity of the grains contrasting nicely with the sticky summer sweetness of the well-dried fruit.

There's something comforting about the transformation of the cereal. Lost in a sea of Spanish faces and words, I remember combing the pantry of my host mother's kitchen for comfort, and there it was, nestled into a box of the Swiss cereal sent abroad.

It doesn't hurt that it's good for you, too. There's little better than raw oats and dried fruit when it comes to good health, and I'm sure on these in between days, with turkey behind and cookies ahead, we could all use a little bit of reassurance.

So see it as you will: recession rations, comfort food, a well-enforced goodness after holiday cheer. You may just find you like it.

HOLIDAY MUESLI

Serves 1

Mix: 1/2 cup rolled oats, dry, 1/4 cup dried apples, chopped into raisin-sized bits, 1/4 cup dried cranberries, 1 teaspoon cinnamon sugar, a pinch of nutmeg. Top with milk; eat for breakfast, or maybe as an afternoon snack.

Dune bogs

My friend Talilla took me adventuring the other day. A fine mist fell as we packed into the car, dog and bags and rain jackets jostling loudly.

We drove away from her house, past the East End playground and out towards the highway on Snail Road. At an old abandoned parking lot at the base of the dunes, we camoflauged the car behind a bush and piled out.

We wound up the sand track, rolling up and down the sea of dunes as we headed towards the water. The vegetation changed—trees gave way to shrubs, shrubs to beach grass, and finally sand to sea. The waves rolled in, crashing white, and we walked south along the shore.

It took us nearly a half hour to reach the bog. Talilla veered inland, suddenly, and there it was: a massive expanse of wild cranberries. The plants burned red. Growing amongst the berries were clumps of grass, and strange tan mushrooms the consistency of jello. We picked, stooped over, until we'd each filled a bag. The berries were firm, a deep scarlet, and big in hand.

When our backs began to ache, we straightened and turned home. We wandered back through the warm rain, searching out the expanse of pavement and the silver glint of my car. We hadn't picked much, I realized later, at home. A few cups, perhaps, barely enough for a pie. I wondered what to do with mine—a pudding, maybe a salad?

I found a few pudding recipes scattered online—most too sweet, one with rice, another with cinnamon and apples. But none were quite what I was looking for. It was morning, still, and I wanted a breakfast dish.

I decided to adapt a dessert pudding, cutting the sugar and raisins and adding an egg for thickness. The rest was easy: scalded milk, a cup of oatmeal, a few spoonfuls of sugar and the cranberries, halved. All told, it couldn't have taken more than 10 minutes to prepare, and after a half hour in the oven, it was ready to eat. I cleaned my bowl, twice, and scribbled the recipe down for safe keeping.

CRANBERRY OATMEAL BREAKFAST PUDDING

Serves 4

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a medium heavy-bottomed pot, stir together 2 cups whole milk, 1/4 cup brown sugar, and a pinch of salt. Stir well, and heat until very hot but not boiling. While you wait, half 2 cups fresh cranberries. Stir together with 1/4 cup white sugar in a bowl. When milk is hot, stir in 1 cup oatmeal, 1 egg, beaten well, and cranberries. Bake 30 minutes; enjoy hot with cream or milk.

Buckling down

It seems November has arrived for good. The light is different, suddenly, the trees stark, the sky a bleak, gray blanket over the woods. The chimney churns out smoke at a steady pace, filling the neighborhood with a thick, cozy, scent.

It is time to buckle down. The forays of Indian summer are past; the weather is contemplative, stern. The oats have bidden their time through strawberries and peaches, melons and apples, and this morning, finally, I returned for them.

They were patient grains—still sturdy and whole after a season's rest, still good from the 20 pound bag I bought last February by mail. They came from a farm in Maine, Wood Prairie Farm, along with the beans and flour and a few packets of seed. They were round, robust, the kind of oat with chew and a resonating wholesomeness of sorts. We ate them nearly every morning last spring, cooked in milk and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and then out the door to another frosty day.

Today, I managed to make them while holding on to the season. I cooked them in milk, gently, added cinnamon and nutmeg, and finally stirred in a good dollop of homemade applesauce to the cooling pot. The fruit blended seamlessly into the porridge, and I sat down to put in a good day's work.

APPLESAUCE & OATS

Serves 1

Heat up 1 cup milk until hot and steaming (do not boil). Add 1/2 cup oats, and stir, bringing to a gentle boil. Let cook 5-10 minutes, or until oats and milk become a thick porridge. Turn off heat, and stir in a pinch of cinnamon, a pinch of nutmeg, and 1/4 cup applesauce. Top with cream and cinnamon sugar to taste; enjoy hot.

Oatmeal chocolate chip catastrophe

Having already confessed my love for chocolate chip cookies, there is little left to admit but that I've made them, again. This time the sin was with oatmeal: thick, chewy rolled oats from up towards northern Maine, coupled with a good bit of butter, sugar, and plenty of chocolate.

I was inspired by an interview with Teri Horn, founder of Hyannis-based Kayak Cookies and creator of the Chocolate Salty Oat. We'd talked about the cookies for nearly an hour; she'd run through the oats she used and her butter tips, and we'd laughed through a few stories of disaster.

By the time I reached home, I was in a virtual cookie frenzy.

I pulled out my mother's oatmeal chocolate chip cookie recipe, warmed the oven, and mixed up a bowl of dry ingredients. Next, it was on to the wet: sugar and butter and eggs and milk, and finally I put the two together. The oven steamed hot, and in they went: 24 perfect drops of gold.

But when the sheet emerged, minutes later, my creations brought to mind one of Teri's calamitous stories. They had spread, thin as a sheet, individual oats stuck to the pan with huge craters of chocolate rising up. They were tasty, to be sure, and at the least not burnt, but they hardly compared to the bag of Salty Oats teasing me from the kitchen counter.

I turned to the Hershey's website to trouble shoot the disaster. "If homemade cookies spread too much during baking, the following problems may have occurred," it instructed with a militant groan. The oven could have been too cold, the baking sheets greased too heavily, oil substituted for butter. The cookie sheet could have been hot when I'd dropped the cookies, or perhaps fructose sugar was substituted for cane? No, at none of these had I failed.

But when I came to the section on brown sugar, I knew what I'd done to deserve disaster. "Dark brown sugar was used instead of light brown sugar," the accusation read, and I blushed at the strength of its truth. Yes, certainly that had been it. Despite the Maine organic flour and thick rolled oats, the stick and a half of Kate's Homemade Butter, and the hand-cut chunks of Baker's Chocolate Semi-Sweet (in varying sizes as Teri recommended, no less!) my cookies had spread. All on account of a sugar substitution I'd never even thought to suspect.

OATMEAL CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

(substitioners beware!)

Makes 24 small cookies

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Beat 1 cup light brown sugar, 1/2 cup granulated sugar, 3/4 cup butter, 1 egg, and 1/4 cup water in a large mixing bowl. Mix in 1/2 cup white flour, 1/2 cup whole wheat flour, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 3 cups raw rolled oats, and 1 package chocolate chips. When well mixed, form into small balls and drop onto well-greased cookie sheet; bake 10 minutes or until golden.