Crock Pot Granola

Hands down, granola is my husband’s favorite breakfast food.  When he was a bachelor, he would eat bowlfuls of granola and yogurt everyday.  Yes, it’s not a balanced source of nutrition but it could be worse (greasy cheeseburgers).  He passed on this love to me.  Naturally, we had to find a way to make it since the itty bitty boxes at the grocery store are so very expensive.  Today’s experiment: Crock Pot Granola.

Anyone else notice that I do everything in the crock pot?  It is a modern miracle at which I marvel.  And it makes homemade granola a cinch.  I like to make this on the weekend when I don’t have too much going on because it requires a little, though not a lot, of attention.

5 cups whole oats
1/4 cup butter, melted
1/4 cup honey
1/2 cup raisins
1/4 cup chopped walnuts
1 tsp cinnamon

  1. Throw all the ingredients into the slow cooker.  (Don’t all crock pot recipes start out this way?).
  2. Mix the ingredients together well.
  3. Turn the crock pot on high and put the lid on.  Crack the lid with a wooden spoon or chopstick so that steam can escape.
  4. Mostly leave it alone.  However, once in a while, take off the lid and give that puppy a stir.  You don’t want just the bottom half of the granola to get roasty toasty.  We want it all to be crispy.
  5. You know that the granola is done when the oats start to get nicely browned.  For me and my slow cooker, this happens around one and a half hours.  If you let it get too brown, it’ll taste burnt.  It seems that the granola gets a tad bit darker after it’s cooled.
  6. Dump the granola out onto a sheet to cool or just throw it into the container that you’re going to keep it in and don’t put the lid on until it’s cooled down.

Okay, I have to add a disclaimer here.  This granola is more like European granola.  That is, muesli.  It is not going to clump up like American granola unless you add a ton more honey.  Which you can do.  Your call.  But the muesli tastes great with milk and especially mixed with yogurt.

Use the oats, butter, and honey as your base.  Then add any ingredients that you like.  Really, I mess around with this recipe each time I make it, tweeking it depending on what’s in my cupboard.  It’s great with dried cranberries, shredded coconut, powered ginger, and nutmeg.

What are you going to put in your homemade granola?

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