Granola the healthy way

After making the dehydrated strawberries and blueberries I decided that I needed make something else to use them up. Hence the granola. I like my granola like I like my salads, a little less granola and a lot of the extras, dried fruit, coconut, seeds and don't forget the chocolate chips. When I am done with my granola it doesn't really look like anything healthy.

I took a recipe from Robin Mather's book The Feast Nearby. Her recipe called for 10 cups rolled oats, 1/2 cup each of two kinds of nuts (I used almonds and walnuts), 1/2 cup each of two kinds of seeds (I used sunflower and pumpkin), 1/4 cup sweetener (like honey, agave nectar or real maple syrup), 1/4 cup coconut, dried fruit and vanilla, orange, strawberry, coconut or any other kind of extract. I kinda did all this stuff to taste and I added semi-sweet chocolate chips because I am crazy like that.

Here are the ingredients minus the honey I borrowed from my dear neighbor Mike

The first step is to heat up the oven to 350 degrees, I know. It's stinking hot outside what the heck is with heating up the oven? Don't worry, it is only for about 10 minutes. So you heat up the oven and you pour the oats into a roasting pan. I had to use two because you are supposed to keep it less than two inches thick and 10 cups is a lot of oats.

That's a whole lotta oats. 

You roast up the oats for about 10 minutes, stirring every once in a while until they look like this:

Nice and toasty

I also added the nuts and seeds to another baking dish and toasted them. They toasted faster than the oats.

Once the nuts were done I chopped them all up. You can also use a food processor but I couldn't find all the pieces for it so I worked it up old school.

Then you dump everything in a bowl and mix it all up and there you have it, granola.

This was pre-chocolate chips. Those little dark guys are my dried blueberries.

So, you know how the granola you buy at the store is so yummy and delicious? Turns out that's because of all the oil and sugar. It completely de-healthifies it. You really gotta get used to this healthier version. I like it but the unhealthy version tastes better. Of course. I will keep messing with this, maybe I just need to tweak it.

Deydrating Mania Part Deux

After discovering how easy it is to dehydrate stuff I decided to try my hand at blueberries! They were even easier.
You take a whole mess of blueberries and wash them really well. Pick out the smushed and squishy ones and then you squeeze some lemon juice on them.

Aren't these colors pretty?

Then you spread them out on the trays like so:

And then you turn on the dehydrator and wait. And wait, and wait and waaaaiiiiit for about 16 hours. Blueberries take a long time and when they are done they look like this!

Lovely

One thing I noticed was that some of the berries were really dried up like super chewy raisins while others were still kinda squishy. I just decided to stop drying when there were a few chewy ones but mostly they looked a little juicy. After everything cooled down they all tasted pretty much the same. They were pretty good while they were warm. Weird huh?

I also noticed that the whole house didn't smell like blueberries. I guess the strawberries are just more fragrant.

I have been popping handfuls of these bad boys for the past few days. Yumm!