Wednesday 17 April 2019

Breakfast cereal with no added animation

I think sometimes we like to read the headlines of a favourite topic so we can quietly say to ourselves 'I knew that' or even better, 'hah, I was awake to this all along...!!!'  Fake food is one of my favourite aha topics.  Having long turned into one of those mad muttering people at the stores with the bright lights and trolley aisles, I feel a sense of pleasure when I read something suspect about manufactured foods that provide more nutrition in their packaging than the product itself, or at least the box may be less harmful.  Commercial breakfast cereals and I parted ways many years ago having gleefully read somewhere that one of the most famous of them contained as much salt as a packet of crisps.  I didn't want to know if it was entirely accurate or not, I just wanted to have my quiet aha moment.  Leaving my quality nutritious breakfast in the hands of food manufacturers was a risky route given they have shelf life to consider and wages to pay.  A lot of popular breakfast cereals now are so targeted at children they just look like an ad for the latest kid's movies - so rather than shoving a tiny Fred Flinstone in my mouth at 5:30am, I figured best if I do my own.  And geez, it's not hard.  You could fill a grain silo with the amount of granola recipes out there but depending on how much stuff you want to chuck in, it's mostly up to you.  Mine's pretty basic with no sugar.  Yes, no sugar needed as I don't need to keep it in storage for a year.  I use locally produced honey to toast with the oats and then add coconut and dehydrated fruits afterwards.  We're really lucky here in Tasmania to also have access to loads of fruit and also left over local harvests that are freeze dried with nothing added.  They do apple pieces dusted in dried blueberry or raspberry.  Just perfect for this.  And then I also add whatever nuts I've got in the cupboard.  We had a bumper crop off our almond trees this year and I managed to get most of them off faster than the green squeaky parrots.  These parrots make a noise similar to someone squeezing a rubber toy.  And boy, can they strip an almond tree fast so I get in quick, with me on one side of the tree with secateurs in hand, and parrots on the other side munching away at a rapid rate.  Once dried, I roast them (the nuts, not the parrots).  Fresh nuts are a treat as I'm convinced the ones in commercial muesli are a bit old, perhaps even had a birthday or two.  Your own granola or muesli (call it anything you like, just not anything that's copyrighted or about to be released into a blockbuster animation movie) it won't stay fresh forever so eat it on top of your poached fruit and yoghurt, and when you want to replace it, the chooks will be happy to help you out.  Oh, and by the way...Wikipedia states that a bag of potato crisps will be 1% sodium.  And a cupful of Cornflakes will be 8%.  Aha! No wonder they keep so well.

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