Yesterday’s Restaurant-Sized Quantity of Granola on a Plant Stand

I have a cookbook that a friend from Wisconsin gave me before we moved with all the recipes my favorite restaurant in town used. I have been so excited about finally knowing how to make his amazing granola! Interestingly enough, all the recipes in the book are written for restaurant sized portions. For example, the recipe for whole wheat bread makes 16 loaves of bread, and you mix the dough in barrel. The recipe for this granola makes an enormous amount of granola, but I love it so much, and so do my kids, that I just stick half in the freezer and in a few weeks it is gone.

When my husband brought home this huge mixing bowl discarded from a restaurant he worked for when we first got married, I was frustrated. It was a huge bowl. There was no way to store it in any of my cupboards, and there were only two of us. What in the world would I ever need this bowl for? In the first few years of our marriage we used it occasionally to cook Thanksgiving dinner. And that was really pretty much it. It languished in a corner of my basement for the most part.

However, now that I have three kids, I find myself actually using this bowl! For normal cooking! It is amazing how much food I have to cook if I want a few days worth of leftovers around here. And enen more amazing to me, there is actually a cupboard in my kitchen that this bowl fits into perfectly.