Breakfast, a good place to start

I suppose the best way to start talking about food is to begin with breakfast. It's a meal I used to always skip, giving my stomach a chance to "wake up" but now it seems to have become part of a slow morning ritual for me and Eamon and on the weekends with Sean, too. Out of nostalgia, I asked my mom for her granola recipe a few months back but since the first batch have been unable to live without it. One day a month I spend a few minutes up to my wrists in oats, nuts, honey and other wholesome things and then a few minutes at the oven door stirring the whole mess. It's great to have every morning with our homemade yogurt, but especially delectable when it's still warm out of the oven.
I've posted the recipe for those of you who want to try this at home. Hope it's okay, mom! Maybe it's just me though, I have a pretty strong memory of my mom doing the same ritual with some variations- it was 1970s granola of course so there are some wild variations in my version... So in my version, wheat germ is traded out for my new millennium ground flax meal; not being a huge fan of sunflower seeds, I use whatever dried fruit I have handy or I buy dried cranberries, cherry or raisins; and 1 box of sesame seeds is 2 cups by my measure. I end up throwing in about 2# of nuts altogether and leaving out the coconut and caschews (sic)... oh and if you want to just put this altogether in the bulk section of your local grocery store, 1 box of oats is really 2 lb 10 oz. If you're feeling like really going for it, sub melted butter for the oil. I'm no doctor, but I imagine that would beef up the cholesterol count for those who have to mind such things (or you could just eat some mackerel at lunch to even the balance!).

For those among you who want to go whole hog on this small carbon footprint, good for your tummy breakfast kick: make your own yogurt. I'll have a post on yogurt very soon. I've been playing around with which started to use, how to prep the milk, raw vs. pasteurized, etc... There have been some successes and some thinly veiled disasters.