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The story of Breakfast goes like this: I discovered a while ago that I had a mild form of IBS. The doctor’s advice (after I ranted for about 15 minutes non-stop about how my jeans don’t close anymore, how sluggish and forlorn I am in the morning, how unproductive I am at work... you kinda get the picture) was to seriously take a close look at the ingredients of whatever I was consuming. Otherwise I should consider eliminating things one by one from my diet to work out where the pain and lethargy was coming from.
It took me a while. I switched foods around, thinking maybe yeast or gluten were the culprit. So i adopted the prospect of a granola - dried fruit, nuts, honey... sounds quite healthy! And what could me more harmless and more nutritional than a normal bag of supermarket granola? Combined with a cuppa skimmed milk in the morning, I’d be good to go! Right?
Wrong… three mornings in a row with store-bought granola literally killed my waistline from excessive bloating and the pain was just phenomenal. When I used to commute an average of 3.5 hours a day, that sort of pain combined with jeans while you’re stranded on a bumpy bus-ride in Cairo traffic is just miserable… seriously, utterly miserable.
So I looked at the ingredients on the packed - and guess what? Over twenty-five ingredients are contained in a seemingly innocent bag of granola: Emulsifier, stabilizer, calcium carbonate, lecthin, lactose, soya powder, phosphate, colors, flavors … I was consuming these chemicals, laden in sugar and sodium. Every morning, I was literally eating an intestinal horror story.
So the outcome of my discovery was pretty clear - i'd have to make it myself. After a couple of hours on the internet, where I discovered an entire world of food-suspicious individuals like myself, I found that it wasn’t all that hard, and that there were a thousand ways of making it. So i tried my hand at it… the result? A house filled with the intoxicating smell of nutty-vanilliary-toasty-maple-syrupy scents that lingered well into the morning of the next day.
I was consuming a homemade granola that went down from 25+ ingredients, to only about 8. If that doesn’t baffle the hell out of your gut, I dont know what will! But my stomach? Not protruding like i was carrying quintuplets at nine-months anymore. The pain? Down a million notches. The appetite? Sated. The feeling? Clean.
And I've made a basic and comprehensive chart for you - step by step constituents of the ideal granola, with enough options to give you the freedom to create it the way you want. It won't take you more than 30 minutes to get it all together and bake it, and you'll thank me later. Likely, you'll never buy it store-bought again!
Check this chart out and feel free to download it:
Seems quite easy, right? The recipe in this chart is designed to give you about 3 cups of granola - I would personally divide it into small boxes and carry one to work with me every day and have my breakfast there, topped with yogurt or skimmed milk. However you choose to store it though, just make sure you let it cool (so it stays chrunchy!) and store it in an air-tight container for up to 2 weeks.
