Homemade Granola

Homemade granola

I spent most of my life skipping breakfast.  I'm not a very morning person and I find it hard going just dragging myself out of bed, into the shower and out the door in time for work.  When I eat immediately after waking I feel weighed down like there is a lump of stone in my stomach.  

During the past several years of trying to conceive, as I learned about the importance of maintaining stable blood sugar levels, I have made more of an effort to eat within an hour of waking.  Mr Duncan, aware of my disinclination to get up eat early, sometimes made me a breakfast parfait to take to work and eat at my desk.  He'd just throw some chopped fresh fruit topped with a dollop of yoghurt and a handful of granola in a travel-friendly container.  Yum.

Since reading this article on the cause of and solution to preventing morning sickness I've been eating even more beans than I usually eat - and I think its working.  I've been getting bored with beans though so thought I'd try branching out to other sources of soluble fibre as suggested by this handy-dandy factsheet. Now that I'm working again, it seemed to me a daily breakfast parfait is the perfect solution.  Just fill it with fruit and oats full of soluble fibre.  The yoghurt adds to my dairy count for the day.

We used up the last bag of granola a month ago and now we're only a couple of weeks away from moving I wasn't about to buy a new one.  Granola is expensive and I find even the low sugar shop bought options to be very sweet.  

Mr Duncan has mostly replaced his toast-based breakfast habit with porridge as part of his blood pressure lowering efforts so we have lots of organic steel cut oats in the house which need using before we move.  We also have odds and ends of nuts, seeds and dried fruit...

First I thought I would make muesli and serve it with fruit and yoghurt. This brought back vague recollections of my mother making homemade muesli.  Then I remembered how much I always disliked it.  The oats became all soggy, tasted like raw flour somehow and I felt like I was eating paste. It was improved a little by cooking like porridge on the stove for a warm winter breakfast but always left me feeling weighed down and stodgy.  Maybe this is the source of my distaste for breakfast?  

So granola it had to be.  I based it on a granola recipe by Elizabeth Rider, but replaced some of the honey and coconut oil with fruit juice and omitted the salt and vanilla extract altogether.  It was so much easier, and tastier, than I expected.  I wish I'd started making it years ago!

Ingredients

• Whole rolled oats
• Nuts and seeds
• Dried fruit
• Fruit juice
• Honey
• Coconut oil

Method

Set oven to 150 degrees celsius.

Mix a spoonful of honey and a teaspoon of coconut oil in quarter of a cup of organic apple juice until dissolved.  I actually only had an empty jar of coconut oil with scrapings left so I poured the juice and honey into the jar, screwed on the lid, ran the jar under some hot water and gave it all a good shake.

In a large bowl, mix a couple of cups of rolled oats with several handfuls of roughly chopped nuts, seeds and dried fruit.  Pour the liquids over the oats mixture and use your hands to ensure the oats are evenly coated.

Spread evenly in a single layer over a clean baking tray and bake for 15-20 minutes until oats are dry and toasted.