Making Muesli

A few weeks ago, during a weekly grocery shopping trip, I picked up some muesli cereal instead of our usual raisin bran. Oscar loved the stuff so much that I decided to take it to the next level and have Oscar make his own! It seemed like a really good self-guided cooking activity, since it's pretty hard to mess up the ingredient ratios.

Part One of this activity involved a trip down the bulk food section of our favorite grocery store. Oscar picked out the oatmeal, a seed (sunflower), a nut (pecan), and a dried fruit (apple). I chose some flax seed and hemp hearts to add, as well. Oscar also had the job of writing the product bin numbers on the tags, which proved to be a valuable exercise in making sure his 2's and 5's were facing in their proper directions.

The next morning at home, we got our ingredients and utensils out.

Mini bamboo cutting board from T.J. Maxx, child scissors, small stirring spoon from Wegmans 

It would have been nice to have all the ingredients mise en place, but we don't have a dishwasher, and I didn't want to be handwashing a million bowls afterwards. So we did the infinitely less aesthetically appealing thing and scooped directly out of the plastic store bags.

One really cool thing about Oscar's choice of dried apples is that we had to cut them up before adding them to the mix! Oscar had a lot of fun with this.

We also added coconut and cinnamon, which we already had at home, to the mix. I was pretty impressed with how well Oscar's ingredient ratios turned out-- the largest proportion was oatmeal, with a smattering of the rest of the ingredients. I did measure out the cinnamon for him, as well as stop him after he added almost an entire cup of flax seeds to the mix (helloooooo fiber!), but other than that, he had complete creative license over the muesli.

We've been eating well for breakfast this week, and I'm looking forward to when we try this again!