Granola Forever

I was inspired recently by a lovely girl in my book club. Over the holidays we had a dinner and she had brought me a batch of her homemade granola as a treat. It reminded me that granola is a great replacement for cereal, which costs me a lot of money on my grocery bill.

About 5 years ago I made granola with a friend and it was fun, but not exactly the cost-saving solution we had hoped for. So, I never thought to try again. However, my kids were not the cereal monsters they are today and I realized that I can make it a lot more inexpensively that I initially thought.

In an attempt to get my kids on board with my non-boxed cereal plan, I thought that each child could customize their own batch, i.e. add cinnamon or walnuts etc. and then chose a name and design a label for it. It was pretty fun actually. We have been making granola for a couple weeks now and are still having good attitudes about it.

Here’s the basic recipe to start playing around with:

2 1/2 cups oats
(This can be any combination of oats, corn cereal, flax seed, steel-cut, whatever you want or whatever you’ve got)

1/4 cup sweet
(I love maple syrup—especially the kind our friends gave us from the maple trees they tapped themselves. It could be honey, brown rice syrup, blue agave, whatever combination you like.)

3 Tbls. oil
(coconut oil is the best! but you can other non-flavored oils as well)

1 Tbls. brown sugar
(can be omitted)

1/4 tsp. salt

1 Tbls. water
(using a little water is supposed to help form clumps... or so I’ve read)

1/4 cup chopped nuts of any sort

1/2 cup cococut
(I use unsweetened since there is plenty of sweet in the recipe already)

Preheat oven to 250 degrees. Stir all the chosen ingredients together and press down into a layer about 1/2 in thick on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet. Bake about an hour and 45 min. or until the granola will break apart as a clump.

Let it cool before breaking into pieces and putting into container’s decorated and labeled Anna's Oaties, or Davey’s Coco-Chip Crunch.