Every now and then the high cost of good store-bought granola gets to me and I make a batch of my own.
As long as I have good oatmeal, I can patch together the rest of an easy recipe with odds and ends of pantry staples I need to use up.
That coconut getting a little too dry – it’s in there. Ditto for dried cherries and golden raisins that were starting to turn dark. I had the tail end of a bag of sliced almonds begging to be used, so those went in there too. And some flax seeds.
The procedure I like is a very easy one, more or less as follows:
I mix up all the dry ingredients with a little oil, honey, agave syrup, and vanilla, and bake it on parchment at 325 degrees for 45 minutes to an hour, stirring every 10-15 minutes. You’re supposed to warm the oil and other liquids in a saucepan before adding to the bowl of other ingredients, but I tend to ignore that and put them in the bowl first, then piled on the dry ingredients, and mix thoroughly. Agave syrup is pretty liquidy, which helps, if you just used honey, and it was thick, you probably should heat it first. The idea is to thoroughly coat the dry ingredients with the liquid, so everything gets nice and crisp and browned. I like a darker granola myself, but àchacun son goût as they say!
NJ SPICE 