By Request, The Granola Recipe

I've been phasing us off commercial breakfast cereal, having developed an antipathy to paying even Aldi prices for -- well, let's face it, you could cut up the box when you were finished and put sugar and milk on it, and you'd be stretching your investment some without even, once you'd gotten over your little frisson of horror at chewing on Crackle's head, realizing any great difference.

In my copy of the Tightwad Gazette I found this very basic recipe, which the family has been consuming with expressions of pleasure. Warning: it's good enough that people will eat it for snacks, too. In fact, it's good enough that they will think that they have to sneak it behind your back, slinking into the kitchen and scooping handfuls of it from the plastic ice-cream tub you keep it in straight into their mouths, scattering rolled oats all over the counter and the floor and down the front of their shirts, so that everywhere they go all day they are accompanied by a little dusting of flakes. So if you want to know who the culprit is, all you have to do is follow the trail to its source -- assuming you don't know enough about the characters in your household to make at least an educated guess.

Anyway, here's the recipe:

3/4 cup brown sugar
/3 cup vegetable oil
1/3 cup honey
5 cups oatmeal
1/2 cup dry milk
3/4 teaspoon cinnamon
pinch of salt (I always forego the pinch of salt, and it seems fine)

Melt brown sugar, honey, and oil together in a saucepan. Combine dry ingredients in a large cake pan (I use my roasting pan). Pour sugar mixture over dry mixture and mix well. Bake at 375 for ten minutes. Let cool in pan, then store in airtight container, such as a reused ice-cream tub.

We eat this base recipe daily, with delight. I've tweaked it around a bit every time I've made it, adding a little water to the sugar/oil mixture when I cook it to make it wetter -- the mix was seeming a bit dry to me, and I wanted to coat it better with the sugar syrup. This worked well: it wasn't enough water to make the oatmeal goopy, just enough to spread the sweet stuff further. I baked it a little longer and let it dry a little longer, and the result was slightly stickier but not gooey granola.

As I say we eat the basic stuff, but you can dress it up with raisins, dried fruit, nuts, coconut, or dates (but tell it it has to be in by 10, or no Facebook for a week).

PS: I have a new batch baking right now, to which I added a little molasses for the sake of our iron intake, as we haven't been eating much meat. I'll let you know how that flies.