Homemade Granola

Joel's parents have a delicious granola recipe that we live by. Granola is a great breakfast because it provides you some necessary grains and carbohydrates to kick start your metabolism in the morning. We love cereal but do not buy it because it is a mystery what is actually in cereal these days and it is expensive. Granola is a good alternative but again, manufacturers are packing in all sorts of unhealthy additives that take away from the positive reasons to eat granola in the first place. Store-bought granola is also very expensive (nearly $5 a box and that is at Food Lion). 

We have taken to making our own. This way we can control what goes into our granola and what our bodies take out of it. First, we used rolled oats. We buy 25 lb bags of rolled oats from our CoOp. Our CoOp purchases food from Something Better Natural Foods. We are paying $25 for a 25 lb bags of organic oats grown in the USA, which is a pretty darn good deal.

This is how we make it:

Ingredients

• 1 C Brown Sugar or 3/4 C of Honey
• 1/2 C Water
• 1 t Salt
• 8 C Oats
• 4 t Vanilla
• optional 2 C nuts (we use peanuts)

Step One

Heat water, brown sugar, salt on the stove in a pan on medium heat until it has all melted together.

Step Two

Pull mixture off the heat and add vanilla

Step Three

In a large bowl, add the oats and pour the liquid mixture over the oats and mix it until the oats are coated with the mixture (it will be a very light coating). We do this step with our hands.

Step Four

Add the nuts

Step Five

Bake the coated oats and nuts on lined (we use parchment paper) cookie sheets at 250 degrees F until the granola is golden brown. Make sure to stirred it/shift it around on the pan every 15 minutes until it is golden.

This recipe will yield a gallon sized ziplock bag of granola.

We like to add raisins, chia seed, flax meal and milk to ours when we eat it. Sometime we add raw honey and Greek yogurt too. As Joel's mom would say, "Yummers!"