Instant Granola Recipe

Yes, this author is a little obsessed with oatmeal, though certainly the subject is not nearly exhausted. In fact, today, I am happy to share the latest in oatmeal technology, and my first original recipe.

For too long, humans have been plagued with the question: steel cut, or rolled oats? Though I cannot provide a definite answer, this recipe is sure to add a new dimension. Here it is, in a metafictionalized script.

(TL;DR: The recipe is recapitulated afterwards).

All the butter to eat you with (a skit)
Act One of One

Scene 1

(Wolf and Pig and in their apartment kitchen)

Wolf: (exhasperated)

Hurry up, pig! We're going to be late for class!

Pig: Now now, Wolf, I am reading a blog about instant granola.

Wolf: Now? We (look at the time) ... we're already late.

Pig: Right! -- so who cares if we miss the midterm -- we can take physics tests any day.

Wolf: You've got to be kidding me... (drops backpack)

Pig: Breakfast is an important meal! (throws 1/2 tbs butter into a heating pan while reading this blog) I can't do math if I'm hungry... (adds 1 cup of rolled oats, with dash of salt and sugar) Do you want some?

Wolf: Huh? Are you frying the oatmeal? It's not making that frying noise thing.

Pig: Yeah, that frying sound is actually from water evaporating from moist food. If you fry something dry, it doesn't make noise.

Wolf: Cool!

Pig: Yeah I learned that from this blog. Actually the entire recipe is given in play form.

Wolf: You would read that blog.

Pig: Stop complaining, I'm making you food. Put on some music, will you?

Wolf: How's this?

Pig: I like it. Who is it?

Wolf: It's this pretty cool band from Long Beach called Avi Buffalo. I saw them live in San Diego - at Sushi.

Pig: You don't like sushi.

Wolf: No - Sushi - its this venue that looks like a living room. It's pretty awesome.

Pig: (Dancing now, a little like Thome Yorke in his new song)

Wolf: Haha you look like Thome Yorke. I don't know how I feel about their new album.

Pig: Yeah me neither.

Wolf: So... what about that oatmeal?

Pig: oh SHIT I forgot it! (stirs the caramelized oatmeal) oh it got a little brown. Toasty. That's cool. Burnt butter is a carcinogen, no?

Wolf: I've personally looked into it, and I can't find any evidence or papers supporting that.

Pig: Thank goodness. (Pours oatmeal into a bowl) Smell this.

Wolf: That smells heavenly. And buttery.

Pig: (poors a little milk into the bowl. Loud hiss escapes the bowl as milk hits the hot oatmeal).

Instant Granola Recipe (serves one)

Ingredients
+ 1 cups rolled oats
+ dash of sugar (.5 tbs)
+ .5 tbs butter
+ dash of salt (less than 1 ts)
+ any kind of pot

Preperation
Preheat pan, add butter immediately (before it gets hot).Add the salt and granola,ix together to coat the granola with the butter. As the pan gets hot, reduce the heat, and stir the granola every minute for 5 minutes. It should start browning slightly.

Add the sugar. The sugar will start caramelizing, so begin mixing immediately. It might get a little sticky and darker. At this point, the mixture is really hot, even if it isn't making any noise. You're done!

Serving
Poor directly into a bowl, and add some milk (or yogurt?). Some milk will steam off instantly, and the steady state temperature will be slightly warm - perfect for these chilly days.

Broccoli Soup Love

My wooden spoon finds the walls of a Le Creuset dutch oven drum, as the Zipf's law white noise from the simmering chicken broth complement the blanched broccoli's intimate crunch in my mouth, and I am engulfed by the thousands of clapping hands emerging from butter-deep onion. This is my kitchen's Avant-garde concert tonight.

A similar open jam occurred last week, though the recipe was ad-lib. Neither the reception, nor the texture, was as smooth.

I am a firm believer in coincidences. As such, when I received a Cook's Illustrated magazine today with a feature on Broccoli Soup, I thanked the many Gods of Probability and immediately dove in and tried to make it again.

Cook's Illustrated, a cooking magazine known more for its television counterpart, "America's Test Kitchen", does an excellent job of finding classic and modern recipes, optimizing the hell out of them, and churning them back out 15 at a time, five times a year. Their methodology is nothing short of scientific (gastronomics?). Melissa was kind enough to gift me a subscription for the holidays.

Melissa is also to blame for my recent broccoli binge, for mentioning off hand that a poster at the Science/AAAS conference last Fall claimed that broccoli helped the brain heal. As this PhD webcomic clearly illustrates, we can safely conclude that eating a little more broccoli directly increases brain size. Despite listening to 4 years of Melissa's advice, only my heart seems to be growing. Happy Valentines Day - I love you Melissa!

What is the garden?

The garden groundbreaking was yesterday, and I'm still overwhelmed by the amount of work that we accomplished. After breakfast and some speeches, about 200 UC Irvine students, staff and community members put together 35 beds, moved 10 tons of gravel and 5 tons of dirt. It was amazing to participate in a project that optimized itself. Each task group, like bed construction or dirt hauling, set the first derivatives of their respective equations to zero, and - on their own, without explicit leadership - became more efficient as the day went on. Yesterday was one of the happiest and most exciting day of my life.

This post isn't about the groundbreaking though.This post I want to dedicate to answering some basic questions about the garden. Questions that I wish we had addressed during the speeches yesterday. If you have other questions, let me know, and I will add them to this post.

What is the goal of the garden?

The primary goal of the garden is to provide UCI students an opportunity to learn about the food system through garden volunteering, workshops, and curriculum integration. Food production is NOT a priority. The garden is an extension of the classroom; it is not a farm.

Who gets to use the garden plots?

UCI already has a few plot-based gardens - they're very popular (Anthill Village Community Garden has a year long waitlist of over 100 people). We're not trying to compete - in fact, no single student will be alloted a single plot. There's no way we can meet the interest through plot rental.

Our garden will operate more like an urban farm - where the garden volunteers and coordinators have a global jurisdiction over all the plots. (See the last question for more information.)

Why a garden?

There are many reasons. Here are a few good ones. (1) We're the last UC without a student-run urban garden. (2) There's a lot of gardening interest at UCI - we have over 1000 hours of pledged gardening from the student body! (3) A garden can provide educational opportunities in three way - through passive exposure to the student body, and active participation in gardening or in workshops.

Why in Arroyo Vista Housing, on an old Volleyball Court?

Finding land for the garden was one of the hardest steps in establishing this project. All the land at UCI has been alloted for something since the early 90s. The Anteater Garden Initiative had virtually no choice in space. After months of negotiations, the former volleyball court turned construction storage was the ONLY choice offered by the administration.

We know that the Arroyo Vista Student Council voted for the garden to cover the south end of the Arroyo Vista field, and NOT the volleyball court. We were really happy to have the support of the AVSC, and we were ready to begin construction on the field. Unfortunately, Student Affairs and the Arroyo Vista Housing Office (Director Harvey) ignored the AVSC's vote, and offered the volley ball court as the only option.

The garden wants to maintain a positive relationship with the AV Residents and the Greek community, despite this conflict of interest.

How will the garden volunteering work?

Sign up at our website! Garden scheduling will be bi-quarterly (twice-a-quarter). After assessing every volunteer's availability, and hosting a couple of orientation events, we will have regular gardening hours a few times a week, coordinated by a garden commission volunteer coordinator. Throughout the quarter, all volunteers and volunteer coordinators will meet on a biweekly or monthly basis to address garden agenda.

Who is allowed to garden?

All UC Irvine Community Members registered as trained volunteers (training will be offered at the beginning of every biquarterly volunteering cycle.

Who decides what food is grown, and where the food goes?

This garden is student run and student funded. It makes the most sense for the garden volunteers to decide what is grown, and how the harvest will be used at the end of the season.

How can I get involved?

Sign your email up at our ASUCI website - www.asuci.uci.edu/garden

You'll shortly be contacted by a volunteer coordinator to evaluate your availability, and let you know when the next volunteer orientation will be. There are also a lot of internship and leadership opportunities through the Garden Commission - the ASUCI entity that is in charge of running the background work, logistics, funding, budgeting, purchasing, coordinating, organizing, etc. If you're interested in getting more involved in the leadership, shoot us an email! garden@asuci.uci.edu

Have another question? Put it in the comments, and I'll add it to this post!

ASUCI Garden

I have a confession. For the last eighteen months, I have been working my butt off with five other undergraduates to establish the first ever, completely student run, education based, on campus food garden at UC Irvine.

Eighteen months ago, I halfheartedly proposed a new campaign to the Real Food Challenge at UCI - a student organization dedicated to increasing the procurement of environmentally friendly, socially responsible and economically viable food on campus through advocacy and education projects. The idea was simple: lets start a student run food garden that operates more like an extended classroom than a farm. The garden space would provide food education through volunteering opportunities, workshops and extension of university curriculum.

Alexandra Nagy - a good friend and fellow co-president of RFC@UCI, had suggested the same idea a few months before. So, we decided one day to walk into the office of the Director of Environmental and Campus Planning at UCI, and asked for a garden. He asked the most obvious question imaginable: how big do you want it to be? uh...well...we were really unprepared, and it was about at this point when I realized that this was going to be a longer project than I anticipated.

A group of five undergraduates began meeting weekly, and in no time, we had the support of hundreds of students, and several key faculty and administrators. In the Fall of last year, the Scholarship Opportunities Office helped me identify appropriate fellowships for which to apply, and then continued to provide essential feedback throughout the application process. In the end, I was selected as an alternate to the Strauss Fellowship Foundation.

Concurrent to the Strauss application process, we also applied for a grant from UCI's very own TGIF - the Green Initiative Fund, from whom we were granted over $30,000! I'm glad that I was able to use some funds from TGIF - which is student funded - to provide students with a new resource.

Finding land for the garden was also a lengthy bureaucratic nightmare worth noting - nearly all of the land at UCI has been planned for development, through the Long Term Development Plan established decades ago. In the beginning of September, we finally were able to settled on a quarter-acre plot of land in Arroyo Vista. This would not have been possible without the support from key administrators, including Vice Chancellor Dan Dooros and Director of the Student Center, and our advisor: Stacey Murren.

This weekend we are celebrating the groundbreaking of the garden. We plan to build nearly 50 raised beds in a day. We'll have free food, free tshirts, and plenty of work to do - all day! There will be painting, eating, planting, building and sweat. We expect upwards of 500 students to attend the event. I hope you can make it - more information is at this link.

I am graduating in the Spring, with a BS in Physics. It is heartwarming to see the campaign that I have worked diligently on for 18 months come to fruition, and I am overjoyed that I can leave behind a legacy at UCI and provide new opportunities to fellow students. Before June, I will help strengthen the foundation of the garden and do my best to guarantee its future success.

I must confess that this project is my love child - a bastard campaign that quickly grew beyond my expectations and took a lot of time from my academics and other interests. I've come to peace with this imbalance. Undertaking this project has only been rewarding an experience, and one from which I've learned more than I would have from any classroom. I encourage anyone with ambitious ideas to pursue them, for the sake of the experience. I am fully convinced that UC Irvine has more opportunities for undergraduates to pursue more cocurricular and extracurricular activities than even the most prestigious universities.

The garden would not have been possible without the encouragement and invaluable help of the following entities and people: The Scholarship Opportunities Office Counselors; ASUCI; TGIF; The Strauss Fellowship; Kevin Schlunegger; Megan Braun, Dan Dooros, Richard Demerjian; Sitara Nayudu; Logan Frick. Thanks to Linda Huang for designing our awesome UCI logo. The garden would have been downright impossible without the Anteater Garden Initiative: Alexandra Nagy, Alexandre Colavin, Lauren Hopfenbeck, Steve Han, David Lee, Sandy Chirico, Alexis Kim and the Real Food Challenge at UCI.

You can find more information about our garden at the ASUCI website. I also invite you to check out our original, 18 page proposal to student affairs.

I'll update this post soon with photos, timelapses, etc. from the groundbreaking ... in 48 hours!