Anna's Granola, for your health!

This is my mama Anna's granola recipe. The real deal. -Lu
Lynn and I made granola today. Usually granola-making is a seat-of-the-pants, visceral kind of experience for me, but I was trying to teach Lynn how it is done, and inspired to contribute to this most-excellent food blog so I did the normally unthinkable and measured things. I far prefer homemade granola to the boughten stuff -- total control over the ingredients, house filled with cookie smells, tubs of sweet nutty granola to fatten oneself on for weeks to come. The key, my dear friends, the absolute key to granola, is: DON'T BURN IT. This is the downfall of all hippie granola makers. Otherwise, go loose and go with what you like.

As a general rule, I like lots of nuts, lots of raisins, sweetened with honey, and don't forget the salt. Vanilla and cinnamon are excellent and interchangeable flavorings, although I don't like to put them in together. Cinnamon and ginger make the granola more like ginger snaps, vanilla makes it more like oatmeal cookies.

Here's the recipe as we derived it today. This makes a lot -- two full cookie sheets while baking. We store it in yogurt containers in the freezer, and this makes 5+ containers. Basically, granola has three components: the dry stuff, the wet stuff, and the stuff that's added only after it is baked.

Dry Stuff:
12 cups of rolled oats
2 cups raw sunflower seeds
2 cups chopped walnuts
1 cup chopped brazil nuts (plus a half a cup of cashews I found in a bag in the freezer).
1 cup sesame seeds (chopping optional)
1 cup chopped raw peanuts

Wet Stuff:
1/2 cup canola or other light-tasting oil
1 1/2 cups honey
1 Tablespoon salt
1 cup milk or soymilk
cinnamon or vanilla or other flavorings (optional)

After Baking:
3 cups raisins or other dried fruit at your pleasure.

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 Fahrenheit
Mix dry ingredients in large bowl, using hands.
Mix wet ingredients in saucepan and heat until honey melts and salt dissolves.
Mix dry and wet ingredients, using large spoon.

Bake on cookie sheets. This is the trickiest part of granola making, but don't let it intimidate you. Loosen up and go for it. I use two sheets with rims and cook them simultaneously on the upper and lower racks of the oven. This takes a certain level of risk-tolerance and dexterity. The upper sheet always wants to scorch on the top, and the lower wants to scorch on the bottom. The basic principle is to drive off the moisture from the honey and milk, and to toast the oats and nuts. I rely heavily on the kitchen timer, being more-or-less chronically absent minded. I usually begin with 12 minutes on the timer. When the time is up, I take the top sheet out, stir it with a metal spatula, and then put it back in the oven and stir the bottom sheet before resetting the timer. From then on, I decrease the times between stirring a minute or two, depending on how things are going. Every oven is different, and this is more of an art than a science. Since we moved to this godforsaken pink stucco palace we have been struggling with a very "difficult" electric oven. The best advice I can give is keep an eye on it, use the timer judiciously, and DON'T BURN IT.

Only AFTER the granola is baked, should you add the dried fruit. Add the raisins or whatever while the granola is hot. Somehow this allows them to become better integrated with the oats and nuts. Burnt raisins is another downfall of hippie granola, so just don't let yourself be tempted to add them before they go in the oven.

Other parting suggestions: For those of you even more decadent about your granola than we, with our indulgent use of nuts, honey and raisins, feel free to use butter instead of oil (a trick, I've heard, of Alice Waters), include any other fabulous cookie ingredients (although somehow chocolate granola seems nasty), sugar, maple syrup, etc... Customize! Be Free!