Slow Cooker Granola (and Intentions)
It is my intention to write a newsletter talking about the shift in my life that is leading me, effective this week, to take a partial sabbatical from teaching yoga. I will still have my Tuesday night class at William Penn House and hope to see many on at least an occasional basis. I will also be available for single and group privates and expect to teach a workshop or two in the Fall. But after eight years, I will no longer be traveling up to Takoma Park every weekend, currently on Friday nights and before that Saturdays, to teach. In this shifting, I have much to say about Kali–goddess of sequencing–and moving within the limits of time and space and some other things beside.
In the meantime, while I am wrestling with how to say what I believe are among the things I want to express and as I deal with a bout of being very busy at work and spending far too much time at the computer to want to spend more time writing in the evening, I just want to mention that it is indeed possible to make decent granola in the slow cooker. I experimented with that today, in between conference calls and emails and document reviews (slow cooking, after all, takes very little consistent attention). The cooking reached its conclusion while students and I gathered for Wednesday night practice. More important than requiring little attention after the initial preparation stage, the slow cooker doesn’t heat up the kitchen, and I refuse to turn on the oven if it is going to be 80F or above. Slow cooker granola is an excellent compromise between no homemade granola in the hot months and turning on the oven.
When I’ve experimented some more, perhaps I’ll create a recipe, adding to the many dozens on the internet. My first attempt was relatively low fat and no refined sugar. Yum. And if you’re a local, do come join me this Friday for a sweetly nostalgic and celebratory evening of restoratives. 5:45pm-7:15pm, Willow Street Takoma Park. Drop-ins and make-ups welcome.
As I walk around the neighborhood seeing all the pumpkins on stoops, like Proust with his madeleines, I remember the scent of roasting pumpkin seeds and the salty taste on my tongue, and I return to the place of my childhood. My mother wasn’t much for holidays, but she very much enjoyed arts and crafts projects. The jack-o-lantern, was something then that showed up when we were little kids. I don’t think there was ever a jack-o-lantern carved when we did not eat the seeds. Part of the project was cleaning the seeds, oiling a cookie sheet, spreading the seeds out on the sheet, salting them, and roasting them until golden, and then enjoying the seeds as a special salty treat. I think it unlikely she has decorated a pumpkin at home since I was in early elementary school, but if she were to do it now, in addition to roasting the pumpkin seeds, I am sure she would decorate the outside instead of cutting it into a jack-o-lantern, so that the pumpkin could also be used for soup or pie.