We’re quite fond of granola at our house, but we routinely run into two problems: it’s kinda expensive and it tends to have a lot of sugar in it. We’ve found one brand of granola that uses just a little cane juice for sweetener, so Sean can have it, but, as with most healthier things, it is even more expensive than normal granola. I still sometimes buy it, for the convenience, at our local Costco, but I decided to recreate it myself. This version is much cheaper, so when I’ve got the time I make this instead. It recreates what we like pretty well :D. I guess you could categorize this as a “copy cat recipe” for the Flax Seed Plus Granola, if you’d like.

Of course, granola is a “to taste” sort of thing, so if you like different things in your granola you can use the base from this and put in different seeds, or add dried fruits, or whatever you prefer.

Pumpkin and Flax Seed Granola

Ingredients:

• 2 cups quick oats (I suspect you could use traditional oats, if you don’t mind chewier granola, but I haven’t tried that yet)
• 1/3 cup flax seed meal
• 1/3 cup shelled pumpkin seeds
• 1/4 cup flax seed
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 2 TBS oil (pretty much any kind–it’s so little that it doesn’t add flavor. I use olive or canola.)
• 1/2 cup maple syrup

Directions:

1. In a blender or food processor, grind 1/3 cup of the oats into a powder. If you don’t have these tools, I suspect that you could just put in 1/3 cup oat flour, but again, I haven’t tried that adaptation yet. I do plan to :D.

2. Mix together the ground oats, whole oats, flax seed meal, whole flax seeds, and pumpkin seeds in a large mixing bowl.

3. Sprinkle in the salt, then drizzle the oil over the mix, trying to get it pretty evenly distributed. Mix a little if you’d like.

4. Pour in the maple syrup and mix until everything is well and truly sticky :-).

5. Now, you can dry out the granola in an oven or a dehydrator. If you’re using an oven, preheat it to the lowest temperature setting it has, somewhere between 175 and 200 degrees Fahrenheit for most conventional ovens. If you use a dehydrator, just turn it on (they usually run at about 150 degrees Fahrenheit). Put the granola in an even layer on a cookie sheet or the rack of your dehydrator (you should line it with parchment paper first, in the case of the rack, but that isn’t needed with the cookie sheet). Bake the granola until it is entirely dried out, breaking it up into clumps after it has gotten good and dry but isn’t quite dry all the way. In my oven the entire drying process takes about 3 hours, and I usually break up the granola sometime after hour two. I’m afraid I can’t be more specific, as the varying temperatures mean that times will vary a lot. Just keep a bit of an eye on it. It’s actually pretty hard to burn this unless you leave it way too long.

6. Once it is done, let it cool completely, then store in a tupperware, jar or ziplock bag. I recommend one of the first two, as it keeps your granola from getting pulverized in the pantry. Make sure it really is all the way cool before you store it, though, or the granola will get soggy.