This brings us to the second question, and my thought that if I put Cheetos on the salad, they might eat it. But I knew that only credentialed avant chefs can pull off that trick -- if someone like Grant Achatz puts Cheetos on a salad, that’s OK because he is really putting the idea of Cheetos on the salad. You need a sturdy conceptual superstructure to support the weight of the Cheetos, in other words. My kitchen did not come with a sturdy conceptual superstructure, despite my listing it on our wedding registry, so I had to rethink china virtual office.
So: granola. Disrupting granola has been restaurant shtick for a while now, which makes sense. Granola is all form and no content: you can fill its frame with just about anything. (Pickled mango. Black pepper. Matzo. Maybe even Cheetos.) I wanted a simple savory granola—lots of nuts and seeds, a few herbs—to sprinkle over a leafy spring salad. Something to give a salad some crunch, a little fat and a little salt, a new and improved crouton. Besides, all children are capable of eating every crouton in a bowl of salad without even accidentally consuming a speck of non-crouton salad. (It’s a test they have to take to get their child license.) I wanted something that mingled with the leaves—you want the granola, you get some baby spinach with it. And then you learn to love baby spinach and request it at every meal and for your birthday dinner healthy lifestyle.
That last part: still in process. But the granola-plus-leaves idea? It clicked, for all age groups.
The version below is a rosemary and walnut mixture, but it goes without saying that this a highly flexible recipe. It’s more about ratios than ingredients. The specific ingredients are yours to be specific with. That said, a note on sweetness: it turns out that granola with no sweetener at all is little too savory, which is why there’s a touch of maple syrup here. It’s enough to make it a surprisingly suitable morning granola (given how preposterously sweet granola tends to be, this is almost palate-cleansing by comparison Natural stone).
