{ via Coudal }

My dad started making his own granola several years ago, and our neighbor Donna has also shared her concoction with us. MT made some earlier this year, and the house smelled so good afterward that I decided to try making it more regularly. So far, I’ve made 8 or 10 batches, each with its own unique set of ingredients. From start to finish takes about 45 minutes, and this is my basic framework:

Preheat oven to 300 degrees

In a large bowl combine:
3 cups rolled oats
1 1/2 tablespoons brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
2 tablespoons flaxseed

In another bowl, stir together well:
1/4 cup canola oil
1/4 cup honey
A dollop of molasses
1 teaspoon of vanilla (or anise extract)

Pour this mixture over the oats and combine thoroughly using your hands. Make sure all the oats are coated well.

Spread in a thin, even layer on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper. Bake, stirring after 15 minutes, until the granola is a light golden brown, usually no more than 25-30 minutes.

Nuts

My favorites: pecans, walnuts, or hickory nuts, combined with blanched almonds (slivered or sliced).

Once the granola is in the oven, put an iron skillet on medium-high heat and dump in enough nuts to cover the bottom of the pan. Keep stirring the nuts to prevent burning. They usually take about 15 minutes, so they’re done about when you need to stir the granola. The almonds make good canaries; when they’re starting to turn brown, go ahead and empty the nuts onto a plate to cool.

Chop the nuts into smaller pieces, either before or after toasting. This helps them stay mixed in with the oats.

Cool & Combine

After removing the granola from the oven, let it cool completely. You can stir it around if you don’t want it to stick together, but it’s also fun to break it up later.

Once the granola and the nuts have cooled, combine them and toss in some extras like dried fruit, toasted coconut, etc. Cranberries and raisins are always good choices, but I keep meaning to get some dried cherries. Today’s batch got cranberries and chopped dates (with added dextrose — it was an impulse buy).

Store in an airtight container and eat within two weeks (though it probably it won’t be around that long).

Tips

Thicker, high quality oats hold up better than cheaper store brands. Right now we’re using Thick Rolled Oats from Bob’s Red Mill. I bet their Organic version would also be good to try. Just make sure you don’t use instant, quick or “minute” oats. I’ve used cheaper oats, but they tend to break down into crumbs. Still, you may find the thick ones to be, well, too thick.

The original recipe that I found uses twice as much sugar, and no molasses. Granola is pretty flexible, though, so experiment. For the sake of comparison, I just happened to buy a package of Bob’s Red Mill “No Fat Added” Granola, and they don’t use any oil at all; it’s definitely more dry than my version, but still very good (and I think they’re using thick oats as well).

Depending on the ingredients you choose, granola is so easy and inexpensive to make that you’ll wonder why you didn’t try it sooner.

I decided to critique the iPad’s virtual keyboard in real time. The results:

The portrait keyboard is, in some ways, easier to use than the landscape keyboard. This really does depend, though, on how you’re sitting/standing relative to the iPad. For instance, right now I’m in bed, with the iPad lying on one propped-up leg. I have no problem with the small keys; actually prefer them on a virtual keyboard.

Now I’ll try typing in landscape. Well, that might be a tad easier. I can certainly use more than just my first and second fingers. You know, perhaps because I’m a violinist, I find it easier to use all the fingers of my left hand when typing. I have to really think when I use all the fingers of my right hand. Anyway…

Back to portrait. I typed all that in just a couple minutes. Easily as fast as I would’ve typed it on a physical keyboard, although my “deliberate” thought process is the real speed block. Despite my typing teacher’s advice to avoid looking at the keyboard, I’ve always been good at glancing back and forth quickly between the screen and my hands. So perhaps that becomes an advantage with a virtual keyboard.

Back to landscape. Now I’m typing with just my thumbs, which is what you might do when you can’t set the iPad down on something. This is probably only possible if you have large hands, and even then, it looks pretty ridiculous. The trick here is to hold the iPad with your other fingers, especially your pinkies, and to use your index fingers to kind of pull the iPad toward one thumb or the other as they fly around the bottom half of the screen. A split keyboard would make some sense, potentially, and could even duplicate the middle keys on each half of the split, so that you can choose which thumb gets to hit them.

In many cases, though, if you’re standing and typing, you’d probably hold the iPad in one hand and type with the other. And, if that’s the case, the landscape mode takes some getting used to. With practice, I can train my hands to cover the full width, but since they’re accustomed to only hitting one half or the other, they just don’t want to venture to keys on the other half. My right hand is better at this, despite what I said before about my left hand being able to more comfortably use all fingers. But thanks to cell phones, our thumbs have already gotten used to typing keys other than the space bar, so the remaining fingers can probably learn some new tricks as well.

In portrait, thumb typing isn’t too bad; it’s certainly easier to reach the middle keys. One handed typing is also do-able, and doesn’t seem as ridiculous as in landscape mode. This might be the most comfortable, though I also keep switching from one hand to the other.

I started out writing this in SimpleNote, then pasted it into the WordPress editor to finish. Really impressed and surprised at how well the editor works in mobile Safari, though you need to use HTML mode.

Man, is this thing slippery.

• What if Cary Grant had been in Star Wars?
• What if Hitchcock had directed Star Wars?
• What if George Lucas had directed North by Northwest?
• What if Mark Hamill had been in North by Northwest?

{ via Coudal }

Building a windowing system on a platform that is specifically windowless, then adding a series of complicated gestures to make it easier to manage that proliferation of windows, is such a failure of vision I don’t know where to start.

That quote concludes a rather “strongly-worded” critique, but he’s absolutely right. My head started spinning as they tossed various windows around the iPad screen.

More info on Blackboard’s Mobile Learn iPad app [Flash].

{ via Chris Clark }

It’s important… that we “rethink our behavior and lifestyle. This is not to say that one should make drastic lifestyle changes or live like an extremist. Rather it means questioning some basic habits.” Like not buying something because it has too much packaging. Or like remembering to keep a reusable shopping bag in your backseat, purse, or backpack.

Jim and I worked together on Split Pillow’s Petersburg.

Enter Reeder, which Shawn Blanc featured on his site yesterday. When I first launched it, I expected Reeder to take several minutes to sync my 27 subscriptions (with some 350 unread posts). Not an enormous list, but one that NNW always choked on. I wasn’t timing it, but perhaps 15 seconds later, Reeder was done.

Suddenly, I’m checking my RSS feeds more frequently, and the interface makes me happy. At least until I come across a post on health care, but that’s not Reeder’s fault.

NetNewsWire has been deleted.

Do you want less, but not boring?

YouTube HTML5

Vimeo HTML5

Can’t wait to update all my posts that currently feature embedded Flash.