Three Things

Book, game, recipe

Maybe your feed is also full of Heart the Lover? Because we’ve all just been waiting and waiting since Writers and Lovers and Euphoria and Father of the Rain and whatever other Lily King books we’ve been completely obsessed with in the past (all of them). Like the others, this book is very special. It feels at first like a campus coming-of-age story, which is a genre I love, and then it turns into something different that’s difficult to describe. I sent Lily an email after I was lucky enough to read the early copy that I weaseled out of her at an event in Portland Maine: “I won’t be able to explain how much I loved Heart the Lover. Refusing the either/or of a conventional love story is so real and so shockingly original and so deeply moving to me. This person who is wholly in love with her old lover, wholly in love with her current life. The totally understandable, tragic, Shakespearean misunderstanding. . . Anyway, I loved it immeasurably, indescribably much. The last line flushed me out with goosebumps—again, now, just telling you.” Please note that the final version is an even more pleasing shade of orange.

We just watched the movie All of You, which I also loved in a kind of similarly stirred way. But then again, I am a sucker for the crying and the starcrossedness and also for Brett Goldstein (aka Roy Kent), who is both darkly brooding and hilarious and should win an award for his magnificent eyebrows.

I mean!

The game is Upwords. Oh my god it’s SO MUCH FUN how had we never played it before? Especially given that our very good friend Judy has been talking about it for years and we trust her completely. You can order it from this admittedly kind of sketchy page at the B & N site, but better yet get it from your local game or toy store. We bought our wonderfully retro copy of it at the Savers for $2.49 (it also had a tag-sale label on it for $3, so the savings were deeply layered) and we have played it every day since. You can probably kind of get the gist of it just from the lid, honestly. It’s this

and then later in the game it’s this

And it all moves quite briskly and twists your brain up good but I do insist that you print out an agreed-upon list of 2-letter words like this:

and also that you get and use a Scrabble dictionary even if at first you’re like this is so dumb none of these words are actually even words. Just go ahead. Then you won’t have to be on your phone arguing about whether or not wordspellerz.com is a reliable site or, really, arguing at all. Because either it’s in the dictionary or it isn’t. Also, life is short—you might as well go ahead and use the word noob. We’ve been playing Scrabble again too, thanks to the dictionary and to our friend Cammie’s delectable Scrabble-themed romance (pre-order it here you nerds).

It’s really an even better game than I remembered, Scrabble. Both of these are ideal two-person empty-nester games because the kids wouldn’t even want to play anyway! Sob!

Okay, granola. This is a version of the granola recipe I posted on my blog a million years ago, but it’s changed somewhat over time so I’m posting it again here. Especially since the “recipe” for raw oats didn’t speak to everyone ha ha ha. Typically I only make granola if we’re camping, but boy if we have it we will eat it every morning until it’s gone. [Insert then delete then reinsert parenthetical depressing climate-catastrophe aside about how the lake at our campground was dried up last weekend so we came home and ate granola in bed.]

Everything Granola
There are many options and customizable possibilities here. I typically use butter, but I’ve made it with coconut oil or a mix of coconut and olive oil, and it’s delicious that way too (though more inclined to burn so check it a little early). You can use coconut sugar or reduce the sugar or (probably, though I am not 100% on this) swap in maple syrup for the honey. And you can really mix-and-match with the add-ins. Honestly, as long as you have roughly 8 — 10 cups of dry ingredients, you’ll be good, even if it’s all just oats, ha ha ha, though that would be kind of dull. I love the excitement of being a hippy freak, tossing in handfuls of millet willy-nilly and popping sorghum in my microwave (in the Venn diagram it’s possible that “sorghum” and “microwave” overlap infrequently). These days I tend to make it with oats, puffed brown rice, pecans, almonds, coconut, millet, popped sorghum, sesame seeds, textured vegetable protein (yes, the self-same TVP you put in your vegan chili in 1992) and dried sour cherries. Make sure your nuts and seeds are very fresh tasting, and consider storing them all in the freezer since the oils in them can go rancid so quickly. One last note (what a bossily unfestive and uninviting recipe intro sorry) is that, if you use gluten-free oats, this recipe is gluten-free as made here.

6 cups plain old-fashioned rolled oats

1 cup puffed brown rice or another puffed grain that’s gf as needed (this is not like Rice Krispies—this is the kind that’s very light and styrofoamy, like what rice cakes are made of, the kind of rice cakes you put peanut butter and honey on, not the kind you turn into tteokbokki geez this is a long aside)

1 ½ — 2 cups coarsely chopped raw nuts (I use a mix of pecans and sliced almonds but walnuts are fabulous except we all seem to react mildly allergically to them and get weird sores on our soft palates)

1 — 1 ½ cups shredded or flaked coconut (mine is sometimes sweetened and sometimes unsweetened and also, when I have both, I like to use a mix of normal-sized shreds and enormous ones)

1 — 2 cups of other stuff, including sesame, pumpkin, sunflower, and/or flax seeds, textured vegetable protein, millet, and/or popped sorghum (I pop 2 tablespoons of sorghum in a paper bag in the microwave for 1 minute, until it just stops popping)

½ cup brown sugar

1 teaspoon kosher salt or a little more (or half as much table salt)

1 stick butter (mine is salted)

1/3 cup honey

1 teaspoon vanilla (you can add other flavorings, like cinnamon and/or turmeric, but I like it best with only vanilla)

1 cup dried sour cherries or raisins or other dried or freeze-dried fruit (or skip)

Heat the oven to 300. Mix all the dry ingredients (except the fruit) together in a very large bowl, then melt the butter and honey together in a small saucepan, add the vanilla, and stir this into the dry ingredients, mixing with a wooden spoon (preferably one that doesn’t hold an aromatic memory of garlic or cumin) until everything seems evenly moistened.

Divide the granola over two large rimmed baking sheets, shake them to distribute it evenly, put them in the oven, and bake for 15 minutes. Now take the pans out of the oven and use a spatula to stir the granola around—the edges may have started to brown a bit, and the idea is to move it often enough that all of it browns without any of it burning. Put the pans back in the oven (switching their positions top to bottom), and bake another 10 minutes, then stir them around again and return them to the oven, switching again. After another 5 minutes (30 minutes altogether—maybe less for olive or coconut oil), evaluate the granola for doneness: it should be fairly golden and toasted-looking; if it’s not, return it to the oven for a few minutes at a time, stirring at each checking until it’s done; bear in mind that it will continue to toast a bit in the hot pans after you remove them from the oven. Allow the finished granola to cool completely, then stir in the dried fruit.

Store in a large, lidded, airtight jar or container or a gallon-sized ziploc. (I use a small flexible cutting board to shovel it from pan to jar.)

Enjoy, my loves! And start looking now for your October 18th No Kings protest! See you in the streets.

xo