I debated what to call this recipe. I was tempted to call it "everything but the kitchen sink" or "clean out your pantry" granola. It is all those things. I made this granola after getting out all my ingredients that I could potentially use; oats, flax seed, molasses, coconut oil, dates, apricots, raisins, and walnuts. I consulted some recipes and got to cooking, if you can really call making granola that.
Here's the thing with granola. You can take this recipe and tweak it. You can use honey instead of molasses or canola oil in place of coconut. You can mix up the nuts and not use the same dried fruit I had. You can use brown sugar over coconut.
In reality I was trying to use up some items in my pantry that hadn't been getting much attention. I'm not quite sure when I got coconut sugar but it worked out well to use it here. I had just the perfect amount of molasses to use up which means I wasn't going to be dipping into our honey supply right now!
Granola can be made in batches and it freezes well. What I really love is that my six and eight year old know how to help themselves in the morning which means when I was in the shower yesterday and they were yelling through the door that they were "so hungry" they said "Oh yes! We can do yogurt and granola on our own!" Win.
During this time of quarantine, and really anytime, be kind to yourselves. Have some recipes like this that don't require you to really make three meals a day. I love it for breakfast, but it's also tasty as a snack and in this case, super healthy too. Enjoy!
Ingredients You'll Need
4 cups of regular oats, not quick
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
4 Tablespoons coconut sugar
4 T. ground flax meal
4 T. wheatgerm
pinch of salt
1/2 cup coconut oil
1/2 cup molasses
2 T. coconut sugar
3 T peanut butter
2 t. vanilla
1/3 cup cacao nibs
1/3 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
1/2 cup dates, chopped
1/2 cup apricots, chopped
Preheat the oven to 300 and spray a baking sheet with cooking spray.
Mix the oats through salt in a large bowl.
In a small saucepan melt the coconut oil, molasses and coconut sugar. Take off the heat and whisk in the peanut butter and vanilla until combined and then pour this over the oat mixture. Pour the ingredients out onto the baking sheet and bake for 30 minutes, stirring after 15.
Place the granola on your stove to cool and stir in the dates, apricots, coconut and cacao nibs. Mini chocolate chips would be good here too!
Once it's cool it's ready to enjoy, although I love a little bit of warm granola too!