When friends are over at 1 am watching “Reno 911” you might make this granola, but start it earlier because they’ll be gone by the time it’s done.

Kirk and Diana came over the other night, after dinner at “Shake Shack,” to watch a DVD Kirk had leant me a while back that I never watched: Spike Lee’s “25th Hour.” It was an interesting movie and afterwards Kirk said, “I’m going up on your roof. I’m not asking, I’m just going.” Kirk likes my roof, and Diana followed him up. I did laundry and when they came back down it was getting late. That’s when we started watching TV and around 12:30 I was like, “I’m hungry” and they agreed and I dug up this recipe from the Barefoot Contessa cookbook for granola.

What you see above are the “raw” ingredients. This is so easy, you’ll balk. But stop balking: it’s easy, I tell you. Just take 2 cups of rolled oats (and I’m halving the recipe because it makes a lot), 1 cup of sweetened shredded coconut, and 1 cup of sliced blanched almonds and toss them together. And if you don’t have coconut, don’t worry, and same goes for the almonds but you should have oats. Then take one half of 3/4 cup of vegetable oil (see because we’re halving the recipe and the original recipe has 3/4 cup of vegetable oil but I’m bad at math so I think you should figure that one out: it’s like 1.5/4 cups, right?) and mix with 1/4 cup of good honey. Then pour that over the other stuff and stir it around to coat it. Pour on a baking sheet and bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 45 minutes or until it’s an even golden brown like this: [make sure to stir it around with a spatula every now and then while it cooks]

Doesn’t that look delicious, at least for granola? I have a few confessions. First, we didn’t have vegetable oil so we subbed melted butter. I know, I’m not sure that’s advisable, but it didn’t hurt the end product, but it did make it cook much faster. That was the second confession: because of the butter it only took like 20 mins. But I’d recommend using the vegetable oil because it’s kind of pointless making buttery granola since granola is what you eat when you want to be healthy.

I tossed the end product with dried currants I had left over but BC (that’s the Barefoot Contessa) recommends dried apricots, figs, cherries, cranberries and roasted, unsalted cashews. If you have that stuff, more power to you. When all of this was done, though, as the title of the post suggests, Kirk and Diana were gone. I was left alone with granola and it tasted good. It makes your apartment smell nice, too. And that’s my healthy recipe for the day minus the butter.