Mai Time in the Kitchen: The Cooking Show!

And a Recipe for an Everyday Granola that Makes Everything Better

Photo by Diego González on Unsplash

Currently, in our home I am the resident “technology hater.” Every ill that befalls my children from headaches to failed history tests to misunderstandings amongst their friends I attribute to the evils of screens. “Well, that wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t looking at screens so much,” I mumble under my breath as they attempt to share their woes. They think I’m being hyperbolic, but time will tell who’s nutty and who’s got a pulse on the truth. Just saying. Meanwhile, my kids just roll their eyes at me and look to their father for sympathy.

But the truth is—and I’m fairly certain I’ve never told my children this so keep it under your hat if you don’t mind—but I used to be a television junkie.

It started when I was a kid, and it’s a bit of a sob story, the whole “my mom was a single parent and I was a latchkey kid and the television made me feel less lonely” trope, but it’s the truth nonetheless. Coming home from school to a quiet house made me sad, but the moment I switched on the television and the voices came broadcasting into my living room from Chicago (“Oprah”) or Los Angeles (“The Price is Right”) or whatever stuck- in-the-seventies small town they happened to film those After School Specials in, I somehow felt better.

Television would continue to be a friend I could count on through the years. Whether it was the “Arthur” cartoon playing in the background while I got dressed for my 8 am “British Lit Before 1900” class while in college or the true crime docudramas I binged after I got married when my husband was working late. Television was my easy companion.

And then I discovered creme de la creme: cooking shows.

It happened in the first couple of years of being married. I worked part-time, which gave me plenty of time at home alone during the day while my husband worked, and I was quickly reminded of something I had completely forgotten from my childhood: daytime tv is the worst.

As a child, whenever I got to stay home sick from school, there was always the initial excitement of a whole day free from the confines of institutional education, until with a bowl of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup in hand, I switched on the tv and realized the only thing to watch was the melodramatic drivel of soap operas or the plastic enthusiasm of QVC. Ugh. It was enough to make me wish I was sitting in Mrs. McDougall’s pre-algebra class finding the value for x.

Daytime tv hadn’t improved much, in my opinion, by the early aughts. As a young homemaker with no taste for The Young and the Restless, I wondered what I would do with my quiet afternoons at home. And then I discovered The Food Network. Mind you, at this point in time, I was still a cooking novice. My mom had gotten me a subscription to “Taste of Home” magazine as a Christmas present, and I started dabbling with a few of the recipes there. But anything that required too many “from scratch” ingredients scared me. I wanted recipes that asked me to open three cans of this and two packages of that and throw it all in a pan, stir it, and serve.

But then I started watching tv chefs like Emeril Lagasse, Paula Dean, Rachel Ray, and Jamie Oliver, and they made it all look so fabulously fun. In fact, they started feeling like friends who’d invited me into their kitchens, given me a front row seat into that night’s dinner prep, and offered me a few laughs along the way. But at the end when they took luscious bites of their creations, savoring the flavors with looks of ecstasy upon their faces, I was reminded that I was in fact not in their kitchen and I was not getting a taste of their hard earned rewards. If I wanted that reality, it meant I had to pull my butt off the couch, get into my own kitchen, and start cooking.

Eventually, that’s what I did. And by “eventually” I mean over the course of a few years. I spent less time in front of my tv watching those chefs and more time in my own kitchen with “my nose in the books,” that is to say, the cookbooks. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

Still, I love the concept of cooking shows. I love the idea of being invited into the heart of someone’s home, listening to them wax poetic about childhood memories or their favorite vegetable or the archaic chef’s knife from their grammy that they would never trade for a Wüsthof in a million years. Perhaps it’s a bit of that broadcasted friendship I was looking for all those years ago as a latchkey kid. Who knows.

So in this digital age where you don’t need to have a contract with The Food Network to make your own little cooking show and since I’m in this season of trying new things, I decided to give it a go. My mom was the first one to introduce me to The Food Network back in the day and so when she came to visit me a few weeks ago, I thought, “Why not do a pilot episode of ‘Mai Time in the Kitchen’ with my mama by my side?” So that’s what we did. And I enjoyed it so much, I’m hoping to have a new one of these to share with you every few weeks.

In this first episode, Mama and I talk about alter egos, a vacation to Hawaii, and my children's eating habits all while making a simple granola that takes our homemade acaì bowls to the next level. If you’d like to join in the fun, check out the link below and hopefully you, too, will be inspired to get in The Kitchen!

Now, a question for you: who’s your favorite TV chef? And if celeb culinary artists aren’t your thing, who’s your favorite cook in your life? Let us know in the comments below!

Everyday Granola that Makes Everything Better

Ingredients:

5 c. quick oats

1 tsp salt

1/2 c. PURE maple syrup

1/2 c. coconut oil

2 tsp. vanilla

Instructions:

Preheat your oven to 325 degrees. In a medium bowl stir together the oats and salt. In a second bowl combine the maple syrup, coconut oil, and vanilla. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and give it some generous stirring to make sure all the oats get a nice syrupy coating over them. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and pour the oat mixture out on the tray.

Bake for about 15 minutes, stir, and then bake for another 15 minutes or until golden brown. In our home, this granola gets eaten straight off the tray, but if you don’t have such a ravenous crowd in your kitchen, let the granola cool completely before storing in a glass jar or canister. Happy baking, friends!