Homemade Vanilla Pepita Granola

I’ve spent the past few days running around the entire state of Oregon with Carey, my friend, fellow blogger, and awesome workshop partner. I’ve been taking her to my favorite places in a not-so-veiled attempt at luring her into moving away from snowy Vermont to the more temperate west coast. We’ve inspected the wildlife along the shores of Cannon Beach (which included gawking over these little guys…trust me, they look even weirder in real life), hiked the desert trails of Smith Rock, drank our way through wine country in Dundee, and wandered the streets of Portland; doing it all in less than 5 days. I knew that it would be pretty hectic running around so much, especially since we left for our workshop in New Mexico today, so we also had to include packing and menu-planning somewhere in there, too. So, to make sure we’d have the fuel we needed to get through the craziness, I tried my hand at making homemade granola so we’d have a quick go-to breakfast that we could eat on the run.

I used Kashi’s new GoLean Clusters Vanilla Peptita cereal that’s made from popped sorghum, smashed red beans, crispy peas, vanilla, and pepitas (aka pumpkin seeds), along with a mixture of honey, oats, sliced almonds, cashews, and a generous sprinkling of sea salt (I am REALLY into the sweet/savory granola combo). This granola is super easy to make (basically mix everything together, spread it on a baking sheet, and bake it), full of tasty nut proteins, and also looks super pretty, too, with the little spots of bright green from the pepitas. Along with the pumpkin seed cereal, the kind people at Kashi also sent me THE MOST AMAZNG plantable book, one that actually has seeds embedded into the pages so that if I tear out the page and plant it, I’ll be rewarded with little pumpkin sprouts!! 😀 😀 😀 They have a page with seeds for each of their newest ingredients, like chia seeds, sorghum, and peas. And there’s also this awesome page that you can tear out and fold into a little planter and fill with dirt. Judging by my ongoing plant obsession (I have at least 100 inside and out of the house…my husband is a very tolerant man.), y’all can probably tell that it’s my kind of book. They only made 50 of them, so I feel really lucky to have this bound, nature-inspired work of art in my home. I have it out on the coffee table now to flip through from time to time, the watercolored pages are my favorite part aside from the plantable aspect. I’ve been drawn more and more to the intensity of nature’s color palette lately; red roses, golden oats, green peas, blue berries…I love them all. Colors tell a story, they catch your eye, and without them nature wouldn’t be half as pretty.