Week 11: Granola

(March 15, 2011)

I picked up lots of seeds so I can make many more batches!  Woohoo!

Due to my growing yogurt craze, I've decided this week to make granola.  Sure you can put fruit and other cereals in your yogurt, but nothing quite stands up to it as well as granola.  By the bottom of the bowl, the Raisin Bran is soggy and the Special K has mysteriously disintegrated.

I found this recipe from www.soulemama.com and the little bits of granola looked so delicious, just exactly what I want in a granola:  crunchy, sweet, with big chunks of delectable awesomeness.  I love it when granola has big chunks!  Apparently the recipe is from a book called Feeding the Whole Family: Cooking With Whole Foods by Cynthia Lair.  You can go to the soulemama link for the recipe or buy the book. 

I doubled the recipe and it made a LOT.  We now store it in the cookie jar (AKA the biggest jar in the kitchen)

For some reason, I thought making granola would be time consuming and/or expensive.  Nope!  Just mix the dry and wet ingredients separately, then combine all together, spread on a baking tray and bake.  Turn several times throughout baking so that it all gets evenly crunchy.  And it wasn't expensive either.  The only possibly expensive items were things that we already had on hand: almonds, coconut oil, and brown rice syrup.  I didn't want to use up all the brown rice syrup, so I supplemented half with maple syrup. 

To make it even cheaper, you could substitute many of the ingredients.  Peanuts instead of almonds, any other kind of oil instead of coconut, and any other liquid syrup instead of brown rice or maple.  Honey would definitely work! And you can add in many other kinds of good things too.  Dave's mom suggested flax and I wish I had thought of it before!

This granola is delicious.  I've been giving it to Charlie as a little snack and he loves it.  Yum yum crunch!