Big Veggie Breakfast with the Family

My Mum, her partner and my little sister have been in France for the last two weeks. Their ferry got in at 7.30am this morning and our place was on their way home so they popped in for breakfast. We started with Mr VST's home made granola, which went down very well and then followed this with some potato waffles (I'd like a recipe to make these myself), home made baked beans, real bread toast, scrambled eggs and Linda McCartney vegetarian sausages. It all went down well with a pot of French coffee and several pots of Earl Grey tea.

 

After that lot we were quite full up. We had a nibble on some delicious orange dark chocolate the Mum had brought back for us and went to visit Mr VST's brother, wife and our new niece. We went for a lovely stroll with them and had lots of cuddles and an ice cream. When we got back I had some cheese and crackers and Mr VST made himself easy macaroni cheese, cooked pasta with grated cheese mixed in, both lovely. 

Mr. VST's Home Made Granola

While I have my ready brek every morning with various toppings (rhubarb is the current favourite) Mr VST usually has granola cereal. After finding out a bit more about cereal from watching "The Foods that make Billions" a little while back and reading In Defense of Food by Michael Pollen (even the British version is spelt this way, if you want to find out more about what it says about cereal you can do so here) I haven't been so impressed with breakfast cereals. I never really was, they're not that filling or satisfying. They don't give you much for the calorie count and most of them are packed with sugar, especially the ones you assume are healthy, like muesli and granola. 

Anyway Mr VST has taken to switching between a supermarket own brand Maple and Pecan Crunch, Quaker Granola and lately some Jordan's Granola too. A couple of weekends ago we were discussing how quickly he gets through it and how expensive it is too so I googled granola recipes and came up with this one.

The recipe calls for lots of maple syrup we went to get some but it was £5.60 for 350ml so we decided we'd use honey instead of the maple syrup and a little dark brown sugar instead of the honey in the recipe.

Mr VST also decided to use raisins instead of dried berries as he doesn't really like them very much. So he got his ingredients together and started trying to mix the oats and honey, as honey is a lot thicker than maple syrup it was a bit difficult to mix so he put it in a saucepan to warm it up a bit so that he could mix it.

The warming worked and he managed to mix it together. He didn't use desiccated coconut in his either but the pumpkin seeds were an awesome idea.

He spread it out quite thickly on two baking trays, he had made double the quantity so he had no choice!

He popped it into the oven for 30 minutes and added the raisins afterwards.

It was absolutely delicious. Much nicer than the stuff you buy. I had been busy on call through the previous night and day and didn't get to eat my lunch until 4.30pm.  I had saved myself a small piece of beetroot tart and had this with some new potatoes and beetroot, feta and quinoa salad. After that I didn't really fancy any dinner so I had a small bowl if this granola and it was so good!

This recipe is so versatile and full of goodness, Mr VST put loads of different types of seeds in it and we were talking about toasting some nuts and adding them into the next batch. I think this is the future of cereal!