Non-Fancy Super-Crunchy 10 Minute Granola

Yes. You can do this.

Ever check out the Vegan or Raw Foods section of the Health Food store and come across these little snack packets of uber-granola weighing 2 ounces total and costing 9 American Dollars? I saw some the other week, and I thought: "This is it. Boutique Granola costs $56 a pound.  The end of the Roman Empire (take 2) is at hand."

Magic Dinner, and That's No Crock

'Tis the season. . .

. . .when long-cooked dishes return to our tables and life gradually becomes more and more busy as the Holiday Juggernaut approacheth. Maybe you want the time to bake cookies for everyone you know. Or put up jars of the last tomatoes of the year. Or recreate that long-lost spun-sugar Titanic that you made as a final project in Pastry School (too bad the ants found the original one!) But dinner still needs to be made, friend.

Well, you probably know someone who brags all the time about their crock pot and you think "I want dinner to be magically ready when I come home from work, too. . ." But you have a small kitchen without the parking space to plunk down one of those overgrown hot plates. We cooks know that the most important Kitchen Real Estate is counter-space. . . especially adjacent to a sink and power outlet (wow!)

Don't worry about that office blowhard. Have you got a regular old soup pot with a decent lid? Do you have a working oven? Chances are very good that even a crappy apartment oven can handle 225 degrees for a few hours. . .

Congratulations! Welcome to Magic Dinner Prep School!

Cooks Should Never: Hotwire Pasta Machines

Fried!

Let's say, hypothetically, that you were operating a newly-purchased, beautiful expensive Italian pasta maker/extruder and it suddenly stopped functioning.  And you traced the problem to a blown fuse, which no one in the greater Metro area can find. And say the machine was still full of dense semolina dough that was threatening to become cemented permanently inside the interstices of the extruder's delicate parts unless something could be done to disassemble the machine.  And imagine that the special Italian wrench for removing the parts in peril was NOT included with the machine by the seller for the simple reason that the parts can be easily loosened by running the machine backwards for 10 seconds. . . except of course it won't run AT ALL.  Time is passing as you and your boss make phone calls to every single electrical supply house within 50 miles and they all say "What size is the fuse? Really? We could order it for you. . . be about 10 days."