When we’re not busy dreaming up new Grizzlies Granola recipes, you can often find us in the kitchen, putting our delicious products to work in classic recipes. For a healthier take on breakfast scones, try this version with Grizzlies Organic Harvest Porridge, loaded with walnuts and delicious nectarines. This is a great recipe to make in advance, and serve warm with butter, jams, and honey on a busy morning.

What you’ll need:

• 1 ½ cups pastry flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon cream of tartar
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 1 to 2 tablespoons brown sugar or honey
• 1 cup Grizzlies Organic Harvest Porridge
• 2 tablespoons cold butter
• 1 ¼ cups buttermilk at room temperature

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F

Dust a cookie sheet with flour

Sift flour, cream of tartar, salt and sugar (if you use honey instead, stir it thoroughly into the buttermilk). Mix in Grizzlies Organic Harvest Porridge. Grate the cold butter into the mixture and blend with a pastry cutter or with your fingertips until the mixture is like oatmeal flakes. Stir in the buttermilk and mix gently and quickly until barely blended together. Immediately turn out onto the floured cookie sheet and pat into a circle about ¾ inch thick, 8 inches across. Cut the circle into as many pieces as you would like and place immediately in the hot oven. Bake about 20 minutes.

We hope you enjoy another good recipe made better by Grizzlies! Do you have any favorite recipes using Grizzlies products? Let us know and we’ll feature it on the blog!

We’re happy to announce that our new Gluten Free Cinnamon Nut Granola is ready to hit the shelves! We heard from customers on a gluten free diet that it can be challenging to find granola that contains only gluten free oats. With a little creativity, and gluten free oats from Bob’s Red Mill, we’ve succeeded in offering a gluten free version of our classic Cinnamon Nut Granola, with the same great taste, crunchy texture, and healthy natural ingredients. Ask for it at your natural foods grocer today!

Karakoram contribution. Say that three times fast.  At Wildtime Foods, we’re preparing to make our second quarterly contribution to the Central Asia Institute which is exciting news.  We were discussing this around the office the other day, and while we were all happy to see it happen, no one could seem to pin down exactly how it came to happen.

Our Grizzlies Karakoram Crunch Granola is a story unto itself.  Truth be told, we bought some awesome waffles from a little waffle shop here in Eugene and were inspired.  One of the waffles was perfectly flavored with cardamom and pistachios, and we sort of looked at each other and seemed to say at once, “This would be great as a granola!”  I guess that’s what happens when you work at a granola company.  Once Nicolette, our granola chef extraordinaire, got the recipe down we needed a name.  Being that cardamom has long been one of the worlds great spices, we thought about the ancient spice trade and how a granola named after it would be really cool.  “Ancient Spice Trade Granola” didn’t quite work, so we kept tossing around names without much luck.  One day our office manager Jenny Buckley and I were looking at a calendar on her wall and there was a picture of the Karakoram Mountain range in Pakistan.  We said, “Hey, that would be a great name for a granola,” and it wasn’t long before we settled on “Karakoram Crunch.”

Turns out, the calendar was a Central Asia Institute Calendar and here we are today.  Giving back to the organization that inspired us. CAI works to support community based education, especially for girls, in Pakistan and Afghanistan.  Its beginnings are told in the best seller Three Cups of Tea.  It only made sense to support the fantastic organization that helped give name to one of our most exciting products.  Every quarter Wildtime Foods donates 10% of the profits from Karakoram Crunch Granola to the Central Asia Institute.  So that’s how it happened, and we are glad it did.

*Image courtesy Central Asia Institute

When we’re not busy dreaming up new Grizzlies Granola recipes, you can often find us in the kitchen, putting our delicious products to work in classic recipes. For a healthier take on banana bread, try this version with honey, whole wheat flour and Grizzlies Applenut Trail Mix.

What you’ll need:

• ½ cup date sugar or ⅓ cup honey
• 3 tablespoons oil or butter
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 2 cups mashed bananas
• 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
• 1½ cups whole wheat pastry flour
• ½ cup whole wheat bread flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• ½ teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cups Grizzlies Applenut Trail Mix

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Grease an 8″x4″ loaf pan.

Use a fork to beat the sugar/honey and oil/butter, vanilla and salt. Add the banana and lemon juice. Sift the flours, baking powder and baking soda. Mix the wet and dry ingredients together. Fold in the Grizzlies Applenut Trail Mix, reserving about 3 tablespoons to sprinkle on top before baking.

Spoon into the loaf pan and bake as long as an hour and a half until done. Depending on the bananas, this bread can be very sweet — sweet enough to stand in danger of burning on the outside before it’s done; if possible, place the filled loaf pan inside a second pan to protect your crust or cover toward the end with foil.

We hope you enjoy another good recipe made better by Grizzlies. Let us know what you think. We love hearing from you!

If you’re like us, you care about where your food comes from. Making food by hand makes it easy to see how important the quality of each and every ingredient is to the finished product that eventually lands on your table. That’s why we take pride in getting to know our suppliers.

We at Grizzlies would like to take a minute to tell you about our friends and almond suppliers, Harvey and John Zinke. Zinke Orchards is a family-owned, pesticide free almond grower in Chowchilla, California. The Zinkes provide us with almonds for our granolas, cereals, and trail mixes, as well as almond butters, roasted and diced almonds for butter machines, and bulk almonds for resale. We could tell you how the Zinkes grow some of the best almonds in the world, but that might be better left to Harvey:

Every attempt is made to grow the almonds as naturally as possible. We use no insecticides or miticides, but rely on beneficial insect predators to control the harmful insects and mites. By not spraying, a natural balance is established in the orchards and we supplement this with the release of predator insects as needed. Crop Monitor, a local company, provides this service to us. During the growing season, they check the fields every three to four days and release predator insects as needed.

In comparison, most almond growers will spray three insecticide sprays and several miticide sprays per season. These would be a dormant spray, a May spray, and a hull split spray, all of which kill the good insects as well as the bad, thus destroying the natural balance and requiring more insecticide spraying to maintain control of the harmful insects.

Not only are Harvey and John’s farming practices wonderfully sustainable, they usually result in less than half the insect damage of many conventional growers.

We feel great about the almonds we get from Zinke Orchards and hope that you will too.

At Wildtime Foods, we’re committed to building close connections with our customers. To be honest, we feel a little funny about using the word “customer” because over time, the people we talk to become our friends. We take pride in knowing our customers by name, not by number. And we love chatting about the little things in life — our families, our pets, our travels, and of course, food!

We’re excited to launch this blog to find new ways to connect with our friends. We have some plans for what we’d like to talk about, and we would also like to hear from you! You can send an email (info@grizzliesbrand.com), and find us on Twitter or Facebook.

Here’s what we have in mind for the blog:

• Food and nutrition topics related to local, organic and artisan foods.
• Info about Grizzlies Brand products, ingredients, recipes and more.
• A behind-the-scenes look at artisan food manufacturing (you’ve got to see your granola being mixed by hand).
• Our perspective on local agriculture and sustainable business practices.

At Wildtime Foods, we all like to have our hands in things. The authors of this blog will include:

• Brad Averill, Wildtime Foods owner, will write about topics related to our values and  mission, including sustainable business practices and nutrition information.
• Whit Hemphill, VP of marketing and sales, will write about new products, events, his travels, and even his kid’s love for Aunt Maple’s Crunchy granola.
• Angela Seits, online community manager, will write primarily on informational topics, news items and recipes.

We welcome you to join in the conversation! Comment, share your questions, your ideas and your stories. You can subscribe to the blog to get new posts delivered right to your inbox, too.