DIY: Homemade Granola

I can't believe I haven't yet shared the wonder that is homemade granola here on PNN! (I haven't, right? Sometimes I forget— I've posted a lot of articles in the year and a half since I've been here. :P) So tonight I made up a batch to show you guys...and the apartment smells like delicious baking oats and honey now!

I first made a batch of homemade granola as a Christmas present for my mom last year. That was right after Adam lost his job, so we had to make all our presents by hand, and I made my dad some homemade almond roca and my mom some homemade granola.

Well, I stored the granola in our kitchen until Christmas day arrived, and I noticed after a few days that Adam was sneaking handfuls of the stuff when I wasn't around. Figuring it must taste pretty good if Adam was snacking on it, I tried some myself, and was amazed at how wonderful it was! You can eat it with yogurt, which is always delicious (and is my mother's preferred method for granola consumption) or with fresh fruit, but you can also just eat it with milk like regular cereal. Yep, it's THAT GOOD.

And yeah, I'm aware that granola is kind of on the outs these days, having been unmasked as, well, not quite the health food it has always claimed to be. But that doesn't mean it's bad for you in and of itself— just that you should eat it in small doses and remember how much sugar is in it when you sit down for a bowl. And really, it IS kind of a health food for me, since it seems to help with some of my digestive problems.

Anyways, I use this recipe as a template, and then I play with it. Basically all you do is: put the dry ingredients in a bowl, mix the wet/sticky ingredients (plus the salt) together separately, and then drizzle the sweet coating over the dry stuff and toss to coat. The recipe is insanely flexible, so you can pretty much cater it to your tastes. For example, I always leave out the sunflower seeds (ew— sunflower seeds in granola?!), and today I'm leaving out the shredded coconut (didn't have any around). Sometimes I've substituted chunks of dried apricot for the raisins, and I imagine you substitute almost any dried fruit (mmmm, cranberries might be nice...) and maybe even switch out the almonds for something else (though I do love the way the almonds toast up).

Pretty much the only ingredients I find necessary are: oats, maple syrup, salt, brown sugar (the recipe says dark brown, but I use light brown because that's usually what I have lying around), vegetable oil, water, some kind of nut, and some kind of fruit. Mix that all together as indicated in the recipe, then spread it on a greased baking sheet or pan. I like to drizzle some honey over the granola and stir that in before I put it in the oven, but people who don't like sweet things, or people who want to reduce the amount of sugar for health purposes, might not want to follow my lead.

Then you bake it at 250 degrees for, say, an hour and fifteen minutes. Well, that's what the recipe says, but the first time I made it the batch was browned and crispy after about an hour, and every subsequent batch since then has taken LONGER than the specified bake time, so I'd just check on it occasionally, stirring every once in awhile, until it's brown.

And then it's DONE. Store it in an airtight container (I use a clean glass Pyrex so that I can see the deliciousness within!) and eat at your leisure. (Oh, and don't forget to add the dried fruit after you bake the stuff, not before...don't want it to get hard in the oven!)

A lot of the DIY projects I've undertaken have been one-time deals; I make them once, enjoy them immensely, and then never have the time, money, or effort to try them again. No so with granola— I make this stuff all the time, and it's a staple of our kitchen wherever we are. Adam loves it too, so it goes pretty fast!