Posted by Kelly

My boss April is a new mom, trying to keep up with breastfeeding her three-month-old twin boys. When she told me that her lactation specialist told her to eat more almonds and oats, I immediately thought of granola! It is a win win for April who likes oats but not oatmeal and finds that grabbing just yogurt in the morning leaves her hungry for something to actually chew. Speaking of breast milk, did anyone notice it is all over the headlines? First one woman assaults a police officer with her milk, and now a chef in New York City has made cheese from his wife’s breast milk. This morning on LIVE with Regis and Kelly (Andy Richter was guest hosting) they actually ate the cheese!! April has assured me that she will do nothing of the sort.

Continuing on, Kristin and I only have one issue with most granola recipes out there, they contain oil. Some recipes over 1/3 cup! In our minds, the best part of granola is the high nutritional content, why would we go and put all that canola oil on it? There had to be a better way. We used some guidelines in Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian as a starting point and off we went!

We have been eating this granola all week with fruit and yogurt, and sprinkled on top of our smoothies. We hope you enjoy our delicious, crunchy and oil free granola!

Crunchy Granola

6 cups of rolled oats

1 1/2 cups almonds

1 1/2 cups walnuts

1/2 cup flax seeds (ground)

2 ripe bananas, mashed

1/2 cup honey

1  tablespoon vanilla

2 cups unsweetened shredded coconut

1 tablespoon molasses

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1/2 tsp salt

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees. In a small saucepan over low heat, mash together bananas, honey, vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Stir until combined.

2. Add all remaining ingredients to a large bowl and mix these together. Little by little add your wet mixture to your dry, stirring to combine.

3. Place entire mixture on large jelly roll pan lined with a Sil Pat or parchment paper. Every ten to fifteen minutes, remove from oven and stir the mix. You want to remove the moisture, so constant attention is necessary!

4. After about an hour, your granola should be lightly brown and dry. Remove from oven and stir one last time. Then bring to room temperature before storing in an airtight container.

** We actually meant to add raisins to this, but forgot to mix them in at the end. Now on second thought we think this might be better with some sort of tropical dried fruit added or perhaps a combination of dried fruits like mango, pineapple and bananas.