California Olive Ranch Fresh California Extra-Virgin Olive Oil

This gorgeous olive oil is the kind of ingredient I want to have on hand just so I can tell people, “Smell this!”  The nose on this oil is amazing.  A whiff out of the bottle is intensely grassy with a little edge to it.  Pour out a spoonful and a trail of lemony floral fragrance follows the grass.  When I hover over my big soup pot after adding this olive oil, I can even smell hints of something spicy, like peppercorns, but more delicate.  It’s hard to stop sniffing when I’m cooking with it.

I’m pleased to see that I made a very good dent in this bottle before writing to you about it.  This oil showed up in my grocery basket back in November, an unplanned purchase but a totally worthy one.  I remember I had just talked with my friend Nicole about how weird I was feeling about money, and when I found this oil at HEB, a sense of carpe diem swept over me and I decided to splurge.  The truth is, though, this oil is a fantastic deal because it’s absolutely delicious and performed beautifully in my taste testings.  It also wasn’t very expensive: I found my 16.9-ounce bottle for under six bucks.  It may have been on sale, though my receipt doesn’t indicate a sale price.

For me, the real test of an olive oil is the one I perform first and most often: the salad dressing test.  All I ask of my olive oil is that it help my salad taste like its best possible self.  Admittedly, I struggle a bit with vegetables here in College Station, but I do my best with what we’ve got.  This oil makes the most of what we’ve got.  The grassiness complements salad greens nicely, and the lemon juice I sprinkle on salads pairs well with the lemon-floral nose.  Lately I’ve been really into adding thin slices of fennel to my salads, and I think California Olive Ranch’s oil tastes great with fennel—neither ingredient overpowers the other, and they bring out similar flavors in each other.

In the bread and olive oil test, I admit to mixed results.  I tasted the olive oil with Pugliese bread and a fancy balsamic vinegar that Matt bought during his last visit.  The balsamic vinegar brings out the floral qualities of the oil, which I like.  What’s odd, though, is that the oil’s grassiness is missing here, like the bread may have overpowered it.  This oil is not a sledgehammer of flavor; it’s more subtle than that.  While it’s not bad to pair the oil with bread and vinegar, I bet that another olive oil would be a better choice—maybe a more pungent oil with a strong olive flavor?

November to January is not a good time of year for tomatoes, even down here in Texas.  I almost skipped the tomato part of my olive oil tasting because the fresh tomatoes are so uninspiring (and not at all in season, though I do wonder about my concept of seasonality now that I live so close to Mexico).  Nevertheless, I forged ahead and bought a pound of Roma tomatoes from the grocery store today and made a batch of slow-roasted tomatoes.  I can think of a worse way to spend a Sunday afternoon than roasting tomatoes while the rain drip-drops outside.  They smelled so good that I wanted to climb inside the oven to breathe in that sweet rich aroma.  The taste was startling and intense, all sugar and acid and juicy explosion in my mouth.  I couldn’t taste the olive oil at all, but I didn’t really mind.

Tonight’s dessert was an experimental one, and I think it worked brilliantly.  I cycled through a number of baking options to try with this olive oil, but none of them stuck around in my head long enough to materialize in the oven.  Instead, I decided to try my hand at a shortbread made with olive oil.  I absolutely love the Orange Shortbread Cookies with Chocolate Chips that my friend Ammie makes.  Though she may be appalled at how I have bastardized one of her favorite recipes, I used her recipe as a template for making a shortbread with olive oil.  I stayed true to the spirit of the recipe, a rich shortbread cookie studded with melty bittersweet chocolate chips.  The resulting recipe, which I will share with you below, was outstanding: a lemon peel-laced shortbread bar with a lightly crisped topcoat and a cakey interior.  They remind me a lot of the lemon cupcakes my mom used to bake when I was a kid.  And somehow, lemon and chocolate are a perfect match in these bars—the lemon’s brightness is the perfect foil for the chocolate’s heavy richness.  I like to think I can taste the olive oil in these bars, but mostly I just taste success.  These bars are good.

Lemon Shortbread Bars with Chocolate Chips

Adapted from Ammie’s Clove-Minded: A Valentine Cookbook 

Makes 16 bars

After my first sample of these bars, I wanted to go back for seconds, but I restrained myself.  We’ll see how long my self-restraint lasts.  It may turn out to be a dangerous thing that these bars are very easy to make and even easier to eat.

A word about the sugar: I’ve been using vanilla sugar a lot lately.  Vanilla sugar is dry granulated sugar that has been infused with a vanilla bean.  It’s really easy to make: just throw a vanilla bean into a bag of sugar, bury it a little bit, seal it up, and throw it back into the pantry.  Over time, the vanilla bean’s wonderful aroma and flavor melds with the sugar to make a vanilla-scented sugar that’s perfect for baking or your morning coffee.  I highly recommend it.  But in this recipe, you can certainly use regular granulated sugar and if you like, add perhaps 1/4 tsp. vanilla extract along with the orange extract.

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter, at room temperature

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, such as that from California Olive Ranch

1/2 cup vanilla or regular sugar (see headnote)

Zest from one medium lemon (a heaping 1 tsp.)

1/2 tsp. orange extract

1 egg

2 tbsp. heavy cream

1/2 cup bittersweet chocolate chips

1)  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.  Using cooking spray or butter, grease an 8x8 pan and then flour it, dumping out any excess flour.

2)  Stir together the flour, baking powder, and salt.  Set aside.

3)  Using a mixer, cream together the butter, olive oil, sugar, lemon zest, and orange extract until fluffy.  Beat in the egg, then the cream.

4)  Mix the flour mixture into the butter mixture just until combined.  Stir the chocolate chips into the dough.

5)  Spoon the dough into the prepared baking pan.  Smooth it into a more-or-less even layer.  Bake for 20-25 min.  I took my bars out at 22 minutes and thought they were perfect.

6)  Let bars cool in their pan for a while.  You can cut them while they are still warm, but I’d let them cool enough so that they aren’t piping hot when you cut them.  Slice into 2-inch squares and serve.

On the Docket

Good morning, friends!  I have a few gold stars to give out today.

* A gold star to my friends AMPD and JD for making fabulous homegrown and homemade raspberry jam and then sharing jars of it with friends for Christmas.  Intensely flavorful, their jam is the perfect balance of sweet and tart.  I love it on buttered toast or squares of chocolate, both of which have that rich melting quality that seems to highlight the fruitiness of the jam.

* A gold star to the main library at Texas A & M University, for being awesome.  They have a cookbook section!  I’m so excited—I feel like my life got a thousand times better upon discovering the cookbook cache.

* A gold star to my friend Daine, for sharing with me TWO recipes by e-mail.  I miss our recipe conversations very much—Daine is such a great cook.  What I would love to see is a cook-off between Daine and Matt.  I think the food would blow my mind.  Plus I think the two of them would hit it off.

* A gold star to you, dear readers, for not flinching at my confession of loneliness earlier this week.  I feel better now that I’ve admitted it.  Interestingly though, I am nowhere near the feelings of loneliness I experienced in graduate school, which helps to put things in perspective.

* A gold star to sweet Saturday, the best day of the week!  Say it with me now: “Aaaaaaaaaaaah!”

I love Saturday mornings at home.  This one today is hazy but warm, so I pushed open the sliding door to let in the fresh air.  Outside I hear the chirping of birds and the whooshing of cars driving past me.  But the day feels calm and relaxed, like this sleepy little college town is still yawning after the first week of classes.

I put my lazy Saturday morning to good use with a slightly decadent bowl of oatmeal, orange juice, and coffee.  The oatmeal formula was this one, minus the maple syrup.  I made a raspberry-chocolate topping with a big blob of homemade raspberry jam (from the family farm of AMPD and JD) and a big handful of bittersweet chocolate chips.  I also couldn’t resist a spoonful of peanut butter (for the protein, of course!), so it turned into a sort of peanut butter and jelly cereal, with pools of melting chocolate.  It was so good that I took a few bites, then looked down to see that the bowl was half-empty.  Wow.  If only I could wash the dishes as fast as I eat!

I’m tired but happy today.  There are so many great things on the docket for this weekend!  I want to become a Saturday regular at the natural foods store, so I’m going to make a grocery list and stroll down to the land of hippies and organic food.  The one disappointing thing about the walk to the hippie store is that I’ve already had two encounters with men who amuse themselves by yelling vulgar things at me.  I can see that pedestrians are rarer in College Station than they were in Evanston, but whatever happened to Southern gentlemen?  I was even harassed once when Matt was with me, while we were waiting for the traffic light to change so we could cross the street!  What is wrong with these people?

I’m glad that most men have learned their manners.  Some of them are really la creme de la creme, like my friend Daine.  I’m excited to make his Middle Eastern-inspired yogurt cake today.  Out of sheer laziness, my baking plans for earlier this week never materialized, but today is the day!  A Saturday with cake is a very good day indeed.

Have I mentioned how much I love a man who cooks?  I’ve had a crush on British food writer Nigel Slater ever since I read his book Appetite, a find in the cookbook section of Evanston Public Library.  There’s something so incredibly appealing about a book that embraces this idea of cravings, whatever they may be: toast, soup, roast chicken, M & Ms, whatever.  This week I scored a copy of Nigel’s the kitchen diaries, a book I’ve wanted to read for a long time.  the kitchen diaries is a year in the kitchen and garden with Nigel, an ode to seasonal cooking and cravings.  His prose are simple, heartfelt, and funny; the recipes make me long for a digital scale and graduated cylinder to master the British cooking units of grams and milliliters.  But mostly I just want a seat at his table, and this book is the closest I can get to that from Texas.

What are you cooking today, kind readers?  What are you reading?  What’s making you happy these days? 

I hope your day is lovely.  I’ll be back here tomorrow with a new addition to Project Olive Oil.  I hope you’ll join me!

I’m Coming Soon

This life—always a mixture of happy and melancholy, sweet and bitter.  It’s not that different from my morning coffee, strong and spiked with cream, milk, and a teaspoon of vanilla sugar.  I love coffee mornings.  I like to drink coffee every other day.  This habit of mine first started as a way of keeping my morning caffeine and sugar intake within some sort of arbitrary, reasonable limit.  Now it’s really just habit because I trust my body to tell me when it has had too much caffeine or sugar.  But I like the ritual, something to look forward to on alternating days.  I drink coffee for the flavor and for the caffeine.  It tastes good to me.  My friend James thinks this flavor explanation is just rationalizing my addiction, but I’m sticking to my story.  Also, I have no comment about addiction.

Last night, I finally admitted a piece of truth to myself: I’m lonely here in Texas.  It feels good to acknowledge this fact, like I’m exhaling a breath that I didn’t know I was holding.  My loneliness shouldn’t come as a surprise.  I gave up all my local friends when I left Chicago in October and of course I haven’t replaced them.  I can’t replace them, not exactly.  I can make new friends, yes, but my old friendships were molded and baked into something solid by years spent together, talking, dreaming, cooking, eating, laughing, crying.  It takes time to make new friends, and for me, it seems to take an extraordinary amount of time.  I can’t dive into new friendship like a swimming pool.  I walk around the edge first, peer into the water, maybe dip a toe into it to test the temperature.  I open up to new people slowly and carefully.

In some regards, the fact that I am a lab scientist is not helping things.  On one hand, I’ve had a brand-new set of colleagues given to me by my circumstances.  My labmates are all very nice.  But I’m also the only woman in my lab, and I feel starved for female companionship.  My lab, like many biology labs, is a mixture of Americans and non-Americans.  In our case, we’re split directly in half, American and Asian.  Though we seem to get along, I am sometimes exhausted by the extra efforts that it takes to accommodate this fusion of cultures.  It’s interesting to me that in science, we take it for granted that everyone will do what it takes to deal with the cultural diversity.  Yet little is ever said about how to understand, let alone work with, people who come from cultures or backgrounds that have little in common with yours.

Even from far away, though, my friendships have been filled with celebration and delight.  My friends Daphna and Daine, both of whom have inspired recipes on this site, were accepted by medical schools.  Oh, and Daphna was busy having twin baby boys at the same time (a team effort with her husband, Ian).  My friend Ammie and her new music group were accepted to attend a cool music festival in Germany this summer, so she’ll be flying across the pond to play her viola.  And then this morning I received an e-mail from my friend Elizabeth, who relocated to Germany for her postdoctoral research, and it was so good to hear from her.

It’s such a big world in which we live, but I thank my lucky stars for e-mails and telephone calls.  And coffee.  Because drinking a cup of coffee, face to face, is the best way to reconnect, whether we’ve been separated by a mile or thousands of miles.  I’ve got to start saving my pennies for a plane ticket to Germany.  But first I’ll be helping Ammie get to Germany because that’s what friends do.  And even before that, I hope I get to drink coffee with Ammie, Daine, Daphna, and Ian in the city that first nurtured our friendships.  Chicago, I miss you and your people.  Save me a seat on the el because I’m coming soon. 

Sunday, with Wheat Berries and Recipes

Good morning, kind readers!

I’m enjoying my morning writing, so I thought I’d do it again today.  My trip to the natural foods store yesterday was a success!  Now I have wheat berries eagerly looking for a recipe home.  A batch was cooked last night and part of it was used in this morning’s porridge, a riff on this terrific combination of oatmeal and wheat berries.  I love the chewiness of wheat berries against the creaminess of oats.  Next time I think I’ll pour some milk over the porridge at the end, as it was very thick and a bit sticky.

I’m looking forward to making something savory with the rest of the cooked wheat berries, like this soup, which sounds amazing to me.  The soup calls for a batch of greens to be stirred into it.  Good greens can be hard to come by in my town.  Every time I go to HEB I peruse the vegetables, hoping to find a bunch or two to take home with me.  It’s moments like these that I miss Whole Foods the most.  (Don’t even get me started about the farmers’ market…)

I made out like a bandit yesterday, finding a big tub of Chobani 2% Greek yogurt for two dollars.  Two dollars!  It was a steal.  The catch is that it expires tomorrow.  Do you have any baking suggestions for how to make the most of my good fortune?  Shannon tells me she uses it in place of sour cream with good results.  (Thanks, friend!  So kind of you to share your findings with me.)

The big item on my agenda today is a long run.  I’ve signed up for a half-marathon in March.  It’s called The Armadillo Dash.  I’m hoping that the race will keep me motivated to get out there and run.  The hardest part of a long run is always the last ten or fifteen minutes—the part where endurance is being built, step by step.  I’m happy to see that the weather outside looks good for a run—sunny and clear, with a touch of winter chill.

This weekend has been quiet.  I’m looking forward to doing some science reading on my blue couch to prepare for a fresh new week in the lab.  But if a nap overtakes me, I won’t fight it.

Morning

I’m feeling inspired for a new writing project, one that’s low-key but fun and different.  I think a lot about writing, my own and other people’s.  Mostly I think about what I like and don’t like in written pieces.  In my own writing, I want more of the former and less of the latter, but sometimes they come as a package deal.  There is, I think, a certain grace that comes along with accepting your writing as it comes to you, the same way that a toddler will stumble and wobble while she’s learning to walk.  I feel like I’m still learning how to write, and I love that.

The other day I was clicking around my favorite sites, as I like to do when I’ve got some downtime, and I came across the art of seeing things.  This blog is a photo journal written by Shari, and I think it’s wonderful.  Her photos are stunning, and her prose are thoughtful and deep with their simplicity.  It’s an inspired combination, and I’ve been enjoying her archives, filled with art and food.

As a New Year’s project, I’m dreaming of capturing some of those small, lovely moments in my own life.  I don’t have a camera (yet!), but I want to try my hand at writing from a different angle, a different temporality.  My posts here tend to be written in the past tense—I did this, we did that—but rarely in the present or future tense.  Tense can have a big impact on the mood of a piece.  So can time of day.  I love the energy of pieces that other writers construct in the mornings, before they’ve headed out to start their adventures for the day.  I like the notes about drinking coffee, making pancakes, observing the morning light streaming through the windows, wishing for success and happiness that very day.  Morning is so ripe with anticipation.  I want to tap into that feeling.

For a few weeks, I’m going to challenge myself to write some posts in the morning, between breakfast and greeting the day’s challenges.  “Challenge” is the right word for it, as I’m slow and sleepy in the morning, and most days I’ve got a full docket of tasks waiting for me at work.  But I’m excited for it because I love a good experiment.  Let’s get started now.

* * *

It’s grey and splattery with rain in Texas today, but I don’t plan on staying inside.  I’m going to walk down to the natural foods store to check it out, something I’ve wanted to do since I arrived here in October.  I hope they sell wheat berries, as I’m craving their chewy heartiness.  I’ve got some wheat berry recipes tucked away in my EatingWell recipe binder—maybe I’ll look at them today to plan this week’s cooking.  For dinner tonight, I want to make my Baked Falafel Patties with Italian Herbs and Molly’s Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter.  I think the combination is going to be delightful.

My weekend is wide open.  I’m grateful for it.  I worked hard this week, so I’m looking forward to some relaxing.  Last night I made Ammie’s Chicago Diner Scones, making a few substitutions, and they were amazing.  I can’t wait to curl up on the couch with a book, a scone, and a hot mug of tea.  For my birthday, Matt gave me a copy of his book, which just came out.  I love seeing the landscape of his academic life, and I love how very different it is from mine.

I’m going to spruce up the old homestead here with some clean sheets, laundry, and taming the recycling.  Cardboard boxes are threatening to take over my dining room!  But I can’t bear to throw them out.  Into the recycling stash they’ll go.

Happy Saturday, friends.

Just for Fun

Blogging is a funny thing.  My motivation for it is like a wave, cresting and speeding toward land until it crashes into the shore in a spectacular foamy finale.  Then the wave retreats, silently, humbly.  These days I’m like the retreating wave after the splash.  I’ve been fighting a minor case of writer’s block, unsure of what I wanted to say here and which recipes I wanted to share.  I worry sometimes that I will run out of things to say.  Or I worry that I’m repeating myself without even knowing it.  For example, being in love is really, really great.  But how many times can you honk that horn before people grow tired of it?

It also occurs to me that sometimes it’s just fun to share something light-hearted.  Not every post needs to be serious and intense!  I saw this variation on the “seven things” meme in the archives at everybody likes sandwiches.  I like lists and I like the number seven, so here I go, just for fun, seven lists of seven things!

* Seven Things I’d Like to Do Before I Die

1)  Visit Europe.

2)  Publish a paper in Cell.

3)  Make a deep-dish skillet pizza.

4)  Own a house.

5)  Write a book.

6)  Teach molecular biology.

7)  Dip my toes in the Mediterranean Sea.

* Seven Things I Cannot Do

1)  Cook beef

2)  Make decent Chinese food at home

3)  Enjoy portobello mushrooms

4)  Go to a bookstore without looking in the cookbook section

5)  Decide if I want a subscription to Bon Appetit magazine

6)  Pretend to be happy when I’m not

7)  Leave dirty clothes on the floor.    

* Seven Things That Attract Me to Blogging

1)  The thrill of self-publishing

2)  The attention to detail that writing nurtures in me

3)  Developing my own cooking style

4)  My love of words

5)  Fabulous recipes and people all over the world, brought right into my home through my computer

6)  The recipes that my readers share with me in the comments section

7)  A writing practice that has made me a bolder, more adventurous writer

* Seven Things I Say Most Often

1)  Sh*t!

2)  Beautiful

3)  [typed]  “Dear Matt…”

4)  Good morning!

5)  Hmm…

6)  Ha!

7)  Oh my goodness!

*Seven Books I Have Loved

1)  The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger 

2)  Passionate Vegetarian by Crescent Dragonwagon

3)  The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

4)  The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

5)  The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by Antonio Damasio

6)  Deep Economy by Bill McKibben

7)  How to Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food by Nigella Lawson

* Seven Movies I Watch Over and Over Again

Truth be told, I don’t usually watch movies more than once.  I’m going to have to pass on this one!  Otherwise, I’ll just tell you about my work-out DVDs and videos, which I do watch over and over again…because I’m exercising!

* Seven Bands/Singers That I Love

1)  Armin van Buuren (technically, he’s a DJ, but he’s awesome!)

2)  Jace Everett

3)  Dan Cohen (his new CD, Shhhh, is just lovely)

4)  George Strait (How ‘bout them cowgirls?)

5)  Our Lady Peace (I loved them when I was sixteen and I love them now as a twenty-eight-year-old)

6)  Coldplay

7)  Matt Nathanson

Now I feel like I ought to start working on that “Seven Things I’d Like To Do Before I Die” list up there at the top!  Maybe I’ll start with the deep-dish skillet pizza and consider it a warm-up for my future trip to Italy.  Molto bene!

Eat More Yogurt

In my family, we’re quite smitten with cultured and fermented foods.  My brother Charlie makes his own pickles now, including pickled garlic which is quite potent, let me tell you.  Delicious, yes, but oh my, that stuff is STRONG. 

I’m not exactly sure when fermentation took up residence in our culinary conversations, but I’m glad it’s there now.  For one thing, it leads to things like grilled cheese sandwiches with a puckery tangle of sauerkraut tucked in between bread and cheese.  It lends the sandwich a similar tart quality as a smear of Dijon mustard does—a nice counterpoint to the rich crunchiness of buttered, skillet-seared bread and melted cheese.  Charlie made me that sandwich not too long after I stepped off the plane in December, and I ate it alongside a medley of his homemade pickles.  Afterward, I patted my belly, filled up with probiotic goodness.

Probiotics, I’ve come to learn, are a wonderful thing.  I find the word “probiotics” a little odd because it sounds like a vitamin.  But probiotics are really biotics, that is, living creatures.  Bacteria and fungi.  Does that sound gross to you?  I’m a biologist, so it’s hard to gross me out with microorganisms (though I have a terrible fear of blood, which is why I could never go to medical school).  My friend Ammie tells a hilarious story about making homemade creme fraiche for the first time.  She was a nervous wreck about it, convinced that she would give her dinner guests deadly food poisoning with her poisonous creme fraiche.  I thought the whole thing was hilarious because I didn’t even think twice about the safety of my homemade creme fraiche.  It seemed utterly natural to me to add yogurt to heavy cream in a jar, shake vigorously, and leave it in the oven overnight.  The next day: TA-DA!  Beautiful, thick, heavenly creme fraiche, ready for anything and everything we might do with it.

As much as I love a good jar of homemade creme fraiche, yogurt and its probiotic cousins are my heroes for a very different reason.  I don’t want to be too graphic here, but the food poisoning that I mentioned a few weeks ago lingered for about a week, leaving me vaguely miserable, with cramps and bloating, among other things.  Something had to be done.  I thought back to the last time I had gastrointestinal issues, and I remembered how I had solved the problem: with yogurt.  It sounds so simple, right?  I had noticed that if I had milk with a meal, I didn’t feel well afterward.  If I had yogurt, I felt fine.  So I started eating more yogurt, eager to heal my gut before a much-anticipated trip to California, and I was able to step on a plane bound for Los Angeles, feeling much perkier and ready for some mountains and sun.

With California in mind, I decided it couldn’t hurt to eat more yogurt to coax my body back to health.  My favorite way to eat yogurt is to buy the plain stuff and then add goodies to it—fruit, granola, cocoa powder, or whatever else the pantry offers.  Sometimes I’ll add a little sweetener, especially if I take the cocoa powder route.  Last month, I made a fantastic granola that went beautifully with plain yogurt, a creamy sweet-tart confection for the 4 PM munchies.  It felt just right for December, made with buttery pecans and sweet white chocolate and studded with bright little dried cranberries.  I actually made two batches but neglected to tell you about it until now.  But I don’t see any reason why we can’t have a festive granola with white chocolate and cranberries in January, especially one that tastes so good with yogurt.  So here’s to intestinal health, yours and mine!

White Chocolate and Dried Cranberry Granola

Adapted from my favorite granola recipe template

Makes a little less than 5 cups

3 cups rolled oats

1/2 cup pecans, coarsely chopped

1/4 cup unsweetened shredded coconut

1/8 tsp. salt

6 tbsp. pure maple syrup

2 tbsp. canola oil

1/3 cup chopped white chocolate (real white chocolate, please!)

1/3 cup sweetened dried cranberries

1)  Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F.  Spray a large rimmed cookie sheet with cooking spray.  I use my well-loved 10 x 15-inch pan for this.

2)  In a large bowl, mix together the oats, pecans, coconut, and salt.  In a small bowl or mixing cup, mix together the maple syrup and canola oil with a fork.  Pour the syrup mixture over the oat mixture and mix with a spoon until everything is moistened and sticky.

3)  Scrape the oat mixture onto the prepared cookie sheet and bake for 20 minutes, stirring with a spoon halfway through the baking.  Stir again after the granola is done baking.  Cool completely.

4)  Pour the baked granola into a large bowl.  Mix the white chocolate and cranberries into the oat mixture.  Serve with plain yogurt.  Store granola in a tightly sealed container.