Great Granola!

Now that you’re making your own yogurt you want to eat some of it with your own home-made granola, right?

I have a few granolas I like to rotate. We have to make our own because granola is not generally gluten-free. Oats are processed in the same mills that process wheat, so oats apparently are full of wheat gluten, unless you buy gluten-free oats. 

The gluten-free granolas I’ve found include sugary cereals in the mix, which is just useless calories with little nutritive value, which is not necessary to have fantastically delicious granola. If you’ve ever made your own granola, you know what I’m talking about. I think we’ve all sampled enough granolas to know that home-made is as good or better (and cheaper!).

Now that I know how easy it is to make, I feel like a fool for not doing this when I was younger.

I adapted this recipe from the Horn of the Moon Cookbook, a fantastic vegetarian comfort-food cookbook from the café in Vermont. The entries are for things like healthier French toast and crepes, muffins, soups, salads, sandwiches, pasta, and cakes. Basically, a healthier cookbook minus meats (it includes eggs and dairy). Most of it is not gluten-free; however, my copy is not going anywhere!

The oats I use are Cream Hill Estates Lara's Rolled Oats. Until I tried these oats I thought oats were the same everywhere. These are not the oats you get at the grocery store, no sir. Really, these are the highest quality oats I've ever baked with. If I never cooked gluten-free again, I'd still use these oats. Plus, they give you great recipes in the box, for oat cookies and cakes. (If you can’t find them and can’t wait for them to arrive to try this recipe, use McCann’s quick-cooking or rolled oats*.) 

A final note – Since the granola does not have any salt in it, I make a flax mix using roasted and salted sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds. The recipe is below. If you sprinkle it on your breakfast, I think it adds just the right amount of salt, and bonus fiber. 

Pecan Raisin Granola

4 cups uncooked rolled oats (McCann's or Lara’s Cream Hill)
1/2 cup sesame seeds
1/4 + 1/3 cup raw hulled sunflower seeds
1/3 cup Grade B maple syrup
1/3 cup canola, sunflower or safflower oil
2 Tablespoons water
3/4 cup Thompson raisins, large if you can find them
1/2 cup organic unsweetened coconut flakes
1 cup pecans, broken by hand into pieces

Preheat oven to 300F. Mix together oats, sesame seeds and sunflower
seeds. Whisk together maple syrup, oil and water and pour over oat
mixture and stir to coat evenly. Spread onto 1 or 2 sheet pans and
bake, stirring and turning the pans every 10 minutes. Bake for 35 - 40
minutes for McCann's, but 50-55 minutes for Cream Hill Oats. You can
add the raisins, pecans and coconut shavings for the last 10 minutes,
if you want them to be a little bit toasted, otherwise add after
removing from oven and letting granola cool. Once all ingredients are
mixed in and granola is cool, store in tightly sealed jars at room temperature.

Flax/nut mix to sprinkle onto the yogurt and granola:

1 lb. bag Bob's Red Mill ground flax seed (golden flax or regular)
1/2 cup sesame seeds

Grind these in blender, food processor or coffee mill:
  3/4 to 1 cup almonds
  1/2 cup roasted and salted pumpkin seeds
  1/2 cup roasted and salted sunflower seeds

Mix well and store in the refrigerator in a tightly sealed container.

*I’ve heard that McCann’s is, for all intents and purposes, gluten-free because they only process oats, but it doesn’t say gluten-free on the label. (I'm not talking about oat gluten, it's different from wheat gluten, but some people are apparently allergic to even pure oats, but that's another story.)