Apparently I am on a DIY food kick this week!  After writing about our home brewing yesterday, I started to think about the other foods we make from scratch and soon thoughts of our delicious, and incredibly easy to make, granola popped into my mind.

I have been in a constant battle recently for something easy to serve my girls in the mornings when we are a bit rushed.  Of course I would love to make my little ones bacon and eggs or pancakes each morning before school, but we all know that some mornings do not play out the way we wish they could. We all know those mornings…When we wake up late, it seems to take years to get the kids even dressed, let alone to get them to use the bathroom and brush their teeth, and then we have exactly five minutes to eat breakfast before we have to leave for school.  Enter…Homemade granola.

I make my granola in giant batches and store it in an airtight container and it lasts up to several weeks. It is much, much cheaper than buying organic granola in the store, and the best part is that I know every single ingredient in my granola!  There are no long, four-syllable words that only someone with a PhD can decipher.  Just 5 yummy ingredients:

2 lbs organic rolled oats

1 lb raw slivered almonds

12 oz unsulphured, unsweetened coconut

1 lb local honey

cinnamon to taste

And here is the incredibly easy part:  You dump all of the ingredients, except the honey, in a giant bowl.  Mix it.

Put the honey in a small saucepan over low heat and warm just enough to make the honey a bit runny.

Then pour the honey into the dry ingredients.  Mix again.

Bake in batches in a shallow baking dish at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes.  (I stir the granola in the baking dish about every 10 minutes to assure it bakes evenly.)

And that’s it!  I store my granola in the bin pictured above and it lasts a long time.  Let me tell you, I can get A LOT of quick breakfasts out of one of these batches.  It is truly a breakfast time saver!