Trust (Sticky date granola)
After a week in Arizona, and three days into cooking for 17 women who had gathered for the Sedona retreat, I was tired.
I made myself a plate of lunch – Tamaliza’s vegan tamale, my cooking partner Audrey’s dandelion green salad, roasted sweet dumpling squash – and went outside to eat in the hammock chair facing the plane trees and red rocks beyond. I ate slowly.
Lunch: Dandelion greens salad, vegan tamale, roasted sweet dumpling squash
When Audrey texted to tell me the granola was burning, I didn’t hear. But I felt it soon after, and went inside. The smell was acrid, but I was calm. Pulling the trays from the oven, I could see that enough survived to feed the ladies breakfast, and it did. Sour pomegranate molasses and sweet dates kissing each other, the granola was delicious, the slightly bitter crunch a perfect foil for the cow, coconut, and cashew yogurts I served with it on the last morning of the retreat.
Granola in process, with unintended burnt result
It wasn’t the first obstacle I had encountered cooking for this retreat. Shopping in Phoenix in 110-degree heat. Sourcing without access to farmers’ markets, which only happened on the weekend. Still, I managed to gather ingredients, and took care in keeping them fresh. But the first night, tired from a day on the road and (not quite) final Whole Foods run, I didn’t notice when I loaded the refrigerators with produce that the left side one was set to 9, the coldest setting. By morning, everything had frozen. I froze too, but Audrey was unshaken. “We could make kale-blackberry smoothies,” she said. “Genius,” I replied. “Thank you.”
Kale-blackberry smoothie improvisation. Photo and recipe credit: Audrey Grochowski
I had trained for this, not just with testing recipes. I knew the hardest part of the retreat for me would be not the cooking but the endurance, the ability to move forward through obstacles even when I was tired, and to do it with self-compassion, not pushing; or else the stress would show up in the food. The weekend before the retreat, I took my 12-year-old son Leo to Boundless Adventures, an obstacle course suspended many feet above the ground. He leapt through it with ease. I stepped slowly, genuinely enjoying the process the whole way. Clip, unclip, clip, step, look ahead, keep breathing. The occasional zipline, which I had never done before, felt like a reward. The courses increase in difficulty, teaching you the mechanics through experience and then evolving them – you did the tilted boards before, now do them again with no ropes to hold. A few times, I took a long pause in the middle of a suspension, knowing that forward was the only direction to go, and I was held. I waited and breathed until I felt that in my body. Trust myself, trust the world, rest, keep moving forward.
As I was cleaning up from the granola breakfast, I noticed a card someone had left in the window. “Leap,” it said. “But my darling, there is a catch…You must jump first, and allow the universe to catch you.”
I remade the granola when I got home from Sedona, trusting my intuition about how to construct the recipe in a new context, new pantry, my kitchen. I took time to reflect and record the ratios and ingredients. I shared a jar with my neighbor Sandra, and took a bag to a ladies’ weekend in South Carolina soon after, trusting it would be welcome, and it was.
Sticky date granola, take two
Recipe as feeling: Trust (Sticky date granola)
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Open your heart and your pantry and see what wants to play.
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Balance ingredients: Dry, crunchy, oily, sticky, sweet. Maybe sour too.
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Add your energy, then let the universe take its turn.
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Accept the outcome. Play again.
Actual recipe
Sticky date granola
Makes two trays, about 3 quarts/12 cups/24 servings
Nearly all the ingredients are used in other recipes I made for the retreat, so the approach is more improvisation and using resources left in the pantry rather than precision and buying new things specifically for this recipe.
Reference: Coconut and pomegranate molasses left over from kale soba, turmeric from kitchari, oats from peach blackberry ginger crisp, dates and pecans from morning tea trays, seeds from afternoon snacks and salads
I credit Alison Roman for the idea to use turmeric as a granola ingredient, and Joanne Chang for the amount of salt she uses in her “Mom’s Granola” recipe.
INGREDIENTS:
4 cups rolled oats (buy “gluten-free” if that’s important to you)
2 cups shredded or flaked unsweetened coconut
2 cups mixed seeds and nuts (for Sedona version, I used pecans, sesame seeds, and pumpkin seeds; for South Carolina version, I used walnuts, flax seeds, and pumpkin seeds. Sunflower seeds are great too)
½ cup to 1 cup oat bran, wheat germ, or psyllium husks if you have them (optional – adds texture and absorbs oils)
2 tbsp turmeric
1 tbsp cinnamon
1 tbsp kosher or Himalayan salt
1 cup oil (sunflower, grapeseed, olive, or a mix of those and sesame oil are all good)
½ cup honey, agave, or maple syrup (***note this makes the granola barely sweet; increase to ¾ cup or 1 cup if you want a sweeter granola)
¼ cup pomegranate molasses (optional but I love it for the sour taste; you could also use date molasses or just skip it)
1 pound dates, pitted (I used Arizona Sayer dates which have a drier texture, but any kind of fresh date will work. If you can’t access fresh dates, you can substitute other dried fruit and call it something else!)
Preheat oven to 325℉ (you could go hotter and faster but monitor for burning :).
Mix all ingredients except the dates in the biggest bowl you have until grains are thoroughly coated with the oils and syrups. Spread mixture onto two parchment-lined sheet pans. Bake for 20 minutes, check and toss so cooking can continue evenly, and bake for another 15 minutes or until granola is toasted, crispy, and hopefully not burnt. Sprinkle pitted dates on top. Let cool and transfer to an airtight container. Enjoy within a week or it can become too sour.
Published October 3, 2022
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