Making Our Own Granola.

Today the boys and I made our own granola. This involved amassing lots of uninspiring-looking dry ingredients, most of which we scored from the bulk bins at Whole Foods: unprocessed sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, slivered almonds, and various dried fruits and nuts. The notion that items you buy in bulk from bins are cheap is, I am learning the hard way, often illusory. Red lentils - cheap. Dried blueberries - are sold at Whole Foods, I think, with a semiprecious gemstone embedded in each one. Homemade granola looked like disgusting slop before cooking but came out all goldeny brown and tasty-looking and might actually be good for us. The kids had a fascinating science lesson when we combined the water, oil and honey in a clear measuring cup and each ingredient settled into its own level, like a very, very disgusting pousse-cafe. There is probably some sort of grocery-cost algorithm, too depressing to calculate, that would reveal to me that homemade granola is comparable, per pound, to something like Alaskan crab legs.