Her Name Was Lola...

 ...She Ate Granola
Apologies to Barry Manilow, but I feel it would have been a good alternative lyric to "she was a showgirl"   Bob's appetite has returned,  a sure sign of recovery. Very appreciative of all your get well wishes, thanks everybody!

We are both very fond of granola. My 1978 Mennonite "More With Less" Cookbook has eight different granola recipes, but I haven't made my own for years. I generally buy Sainsbury's "Simple Granola" and throw in dried fruit and banana chips [bought cheaply from the friendly guy on Fakenham Market] But then I heard Nadiya Hussein talking about the "Bread granola" she makes for her children. So I began saving crusts and solitary slices in a bag in the freezer. And this week I made some...

Ingredients

300g/10½oz stale bread slices, cut into 1cm/½in cubes
200g/7oz slivered almonds
50g/1¾oz sunflower seeds
50g/1¾oz oats

25g/1oz desiccated coconut
200ml/7fl oz coconut oil melted
200ml/7fl oz maple syrup
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp almond extract
3 tsp ground  cinnamon
1 orange, zest only
200g/7oz dates chopped
Method

Preheat the oven to 190C/170C Fan/Gas 5.
Place the bread cubes on a large baking tray. Add the almonds, sunflower seeds, oats and desiccated
coconut and mix everything together.
Mix the coconut oil, maple syrup, vanilla extract and almond extract together in a small jug and drizzle over the almond mixture. Get your hands in and make sure everything is well coated.
Sprinkle over the cinnamon, grate over the orange zest and mix again with a spoon.
Bake for 30–35 minutes, stirring halfway through to make sure everything is evenly golden.
Once everything is crisp and golden, remove from the oven, add the dates and mix through. Leave to cool. Once cooled, store the granola in an airtight container. 
Substitutions - I was using what I had in the cupboard, so used mixed nuts, and mixed seeds. I had no coconut oil or maple syrup. Rapeseed oil and golden syrup worked fine. No dates on hand so I chopped dried apricots and added a handful of sultanas.

Here it is in my tall lock'n'lock cereal box. The recipe says 'serves 4' but we've already had 4 portions and we're barely halfway through the quantity. Bob says it tastes more like Cinnamon Toast Crunch' than granola, which makes senses as it is bread-based after all.

Bread-and-warm-milk used to be very common as a breakfast food. Dating back to the Middle Ages it was called 'sop' [a precursor to 'soup'] and was a way of using up the stale bread and preventing waste. It was popular during WW and I ate it as a child in the late 50s. In Feed Your Family for £4 a day [Bernadine Lawrence 1989] she makes this as a breakfast dish using bread or toast cubes. 

Nadiya's recipe is tasty and ZeroWaste. I shall do it again!

ALSO thank you everybody for the positive comments about recycling and labels on last week's post. Steph said she showed it to her team at Tangible, who had helped with all the OPRL research. 

Have you ever recycled stale bread into a breakfast dish?