Healthy? Chyea Right.

In an attempt to eat more healthy and spend less money, I made homemade granola.  Granola is one of those things that’s expensive to buy and misleadingly unhealthy.  There’s always tons of sugar in it and the price is ridiculously marked up.

I love eating granola with my greek yogurt every morning, so I came up with the recipe below and toasted up some oats.  I got the general granola guidelines from here.  I doubled the recipe because I knew that Normalicious would eat a lot since he likes granola as well.  He doesn’t like raisins so I omitted fruit.  Granola with only toasted oats just didn’t sound appealing to me so I added slivered almonds.

Kitchen Mischiefs’s Homemade Kind of Healthy Granola (this is a doubled recipe)

Ingredients:

4 cups old-fashioned oats

4 tbs dark brown sugar

1/2 tsp. salt

2 cup slivered almonds (optional)

1/2 cup honey (you can use maple syrup)

6 tbs vegetable

2 tsp vanilla (I added the vanilla because you can never go wrong with vanilla!)

1 tb. water

 

Directions: 

1)  Preheat oven to 275 degrees and coat a 9-by-13-inch pan or Pyrex with cooking spray.

2)  Mix oats, brown sugar, salt and almonds together in a bowl.

3)  Bring honey, oil, vanilla, and water and any other flavoring you use to a simmer in a saucepan over low heat. Drizzle over oat mixture and stir.

4)  Pour the stirred oats onto prepared pan. Working a handful at a time, squeeze oats to form small clumps.

5)  Bake for 30 minutes.  Check on the granola.  If it’s not golden brown, bake for 15 more minutes.

Let cool.

6)  The guidelines I got in that link above says “Granola can be stored in an airtight tin for up to two weeks.”   I found this to be untrue.  It’ll last for about one week in an airtight container.  Afterwards, the taste and quality isn’t quite the same.  Best eaten when fresh.

The reason you see cookies in this picture, hahaah, is because, as I mentioned in the previous post, I have a weakness for cookies.  Even though we were trying to be healthy, I still caved and ended up making chocolate chip cookies.  I LOVE me some good chocolate chip cookies.  This is one of my favorite recipes from Bakerella.  Funny thing, I ran out of regular sugar so I ended up using about 1/4 cup of sugar instead of half a cup, and added an extra 1/4 cup of brown sugar to the mix.  I think it made it even better since the brown sugar carmelizes better and makes cookies crispy!  I love crispy cookies!