Granola

by Liz Child
Granola recipe illustration from my book, available to add to your fruit, veg and groceries order here.

Shop bought granola is delicious, but usually quite expensive and stored in a plastic wrapper. So if you are wanting to save money and avoid plastic packaging, making your own is the solution. Often shop bought granola is surprisingly high in sugar too! My recipe is sweetened with just date syrup (or if I can’t find date syrup I just blend dates and water into a smooth sauce and use that – in fact it’s better this way as you keep all the good fibre of the dates in the granola too). We sell oats, nuts, seeds and dried fruit in plastic free or compostable packaging and this recipe blows any shop bought one I’ve tried out of the water. Store it in an airtight container like a large glass jar and it should stay fresh and crunchy for at least 1 month…that’s if you don’t eat it all up before then! Liz x

Ingredients

Method

Pre-heat your oven to 150C and prepare a couple of large baking dishes or the bottom of your grill tray. Line them with re-usable or compostable baking parchment.

In a large bowl, measure out your oats, spices, salt, nuts and seeds. Do not add the dried fruit yet! Give the dry mixture a good stir to evenly disperse the spices and salt before adding the oil and date syrup.

Add the oil and date syrup/sauce and stir well to coat all the dry ingredients.

Spread the granola out onto your lined trays into a thin 1-2cm layer.

Bake the granola in the oven. Take it out every 10-15 minutes and stir to ensure the granola gets evenly baked.

Once it’s nice and crunchy and tastes perfectly toasted, remove the granola from the oven and stir through all the dried fruit.

Allow the granola to completely cool down in the trays before storing it in an airtight container.

Enjoy with your favourite milk or yoghurt or sprinkle it on top of ice cream or smoothie bowls, or just eat it dry as a snack!

Smoked Carrot & Scrambled Tofu

by Liz Child

Arn’t we lucky that the worlds tastiest organic carrots are a staple in every weekly Green Earth Organics veg box? Here’s one way to use them up in something a little bit different. Before going plant based, smoked salmon and soft scrambled eggs was one of my favourite breakfasts, reserved for special occasions like Christmas morning, Mother’s Day birthdays and so on. So I’ve recreated the dish with smoked carrot strips and scrambled, wobbly, silken tofu. It’s honestly, so delicious! Especially when accompanied with a celebratory glass of fizz (we also do this alcohol free one).

Carrots are perfect for this dish, they’re just the right colour and texture. When steam-baked with all the salty, tangy, smokey flavours they get just soft enough, but at the same time hold their shape perfectly. And of course you can also use this part of the recipe in any dish where smoked salmon is required. On bagels with cream cheese and capers? Stirred through a creamy pasta? As part of a lazy sushi bowl?

Silken tofu is the best tofu to use for making scramble. I see a lot of recipes calling for firm tofu, but it’s much too dry. Scramble should be silky soft, wobbly and beautifully buttery. If you are really missing that eggy flavour, get hold of some black salt and sprinkle over a tiny pinch of that just before piling on the smoked carrots. It’s sublime!

As always, let us know in the comments or over on our friendly Facebook page if you make this dish. We love to see what you’ve been cooking! Liz x

Smoked Carrot Ingredients

Method

Scrub the carrots then use a peeler to cut as many long strips as you can out of them. You’ll be left with thick middle bits – just eat those with hummus or chop them up and stick them in a soup or a stew.

Then put all the ingredients in a small baking dish and toss the carrots strips well so that they are all evenly coated in the marinade.

Cover the dish with foil or a baking sheet and put it in a preheated oven at 200C for 15-20 minutes or until the carrot strips are soft, but not too soft… Take the dish out every 5-10 minutes and stir to ensure the pieces of carrots on the sides of the dish are not getting over cooked.

Then put the steam-baked carrots and all the juices into a small box or covered bowl in the fridge overnight or for at least a couple of hours to marinade further.

Serve piled up on buttery toast with scrambled tofu and sprigs of dill.

Scrambled Tofu

Making a wobbly, delicious scramble is easy with silken tofu. Simply heat up a knob of butter in a pan until it melts, add the contents of a pack of silken tofu (I really like the Clearspring Organic one), season it with salt, pepper and a pinch of ground turmeric and heat up. Stir gently to break up the tofu into little curds as you heat. Then serve it on buttery toast and add an optional sprinkle of eggy black salt.