The hunt for the perfect granola recipe

If you saw my post a couple weeks ago about breakfast, you already know we eat a lot of yogurt in our house. Not only do the girls eat it daily, but it's also the "go-to" breakfast choice of Trey and me. And what is better with yogurt than some granola and fresh fruit?

I have spent the better part of the last year searching for the perfect granola recipe. And I'm really not exaggerating - it's hard to find a great one! Some are too salty, some are too sweet, some include really odd ingredients or things I don't have on hand (if it isn't easy for me to replicate on a regular basis, I don't even need to try it once). But thanks to Pinterest, I recently stumbled across My Kitchen Addiction's yummy take on granola incorporating dried blueberries and flax seed. Of course, because I can't leave well enough alone I had to tweak the recipe for my own liking...and thus was born what I now affectionately refer to as my Go-To Granola recipe.

Go-To Granola (original recipe found here)
Makes about 10 cups

6 1/2 cups old-fashioned oats
1 cup chopped almonds
1 cup chopped pecans
1 cup chopped walnuts
1/4 cup flax seeds
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees.

In a large mixing bowl, stir together the oats, almonds, pecans, walnuts, flax seeds, salt, cinnamon and ginger.

In a large measuring cup (makes it easier for pouring, although a bowl would work fine), whisk together the honey and olive oil until well combined. Pour the honey/oil mixture over the oats mixture and stir to evenly coat everything.

Transfer to two large jelly roll pans (read: baking sheets with sides) and spread the granola into an even layer.

Bake for about 45 minutes total, stirring every 10-15 minutes with a spatula. Make sure to watch it the last 10-15 minutes because it can burn easily (thanks to the addition of honey).

Allow the granola to cool completely on the pans, then transfer to an airtight container. I make this batch at the beginning of each month and it easily lasts me close to four weeks. My favorite way to dish it up is with some plain Greek yogurt and frozen blueberries (they thaw quickly). Healthy and delicious!

And here are a few tips on the granola preparation process:

• I totally cheat on the chopped nuts, because buying them chopped is so much more expensive than buying the massive bags of whole nuts at Costco! So here's my super fancy way of chopping nuts...it involves a kitchen mallet and a ziplock bag. :)

Add whole nuts directly into the ziplock bag and seal tightly...

And start pounding out your frustrations with a kitchen mallet! Works perfectly :)

• I also buy my flax seed in bulk at Costco - it's organic and lasts forever. My sweet E has had a hard time with the whole milk transition, so I tend to add flax seed to a lot of stuff (smoothies, oatmeal, baked goods, etc.). It's a great food to have on hand!

• The original recipe called for maple syrup instead of honey, but I modified it to use what I usually have on hand. You could also substitute for a smaller portion of agave if you typically keep that in your pantry - play around with it!

Hope you try it out and enjoy it as much as we have! We'll be taking a brief sugar hiatus hiatus this week as we celebrate C's 4th birthday, but we'll check back in after we resurface from the sugar comas to talk again about real food some more. :) I'm experimenting with ways to make her birthday treats a little less processed this year, so fingers crossed that works...but I'm sure I'll have some disasters to share in a week or so! 

Thanks for reading!

Tackling the yogurt cup

As long as I can remember, I've operated under the philosophy of breakfast being the most important meal of the day. We try desperately to have good, hearty, well-balanced breakfasts before we head off to preschool / work in the morning, and I'm always on the lookout for the next best breakfast option to offer the kiddos. I'm not going to lie - when we decided to tackle this "real food" challenge almost a month ago, I figured breakfast would be our easy meal...until I started reading labels.

My goal for breakfast is pretty simple: serve the girls a dairy/protein, grain and fruit serving every morning. This is based off the recommendation from my pediatrician and I like the basic principle behind it. It leaves us some leeway as to what each day looks like (because variety is the spice of life when you have two kids under the age of four), but the framework is there.

Our fruit most days ends up being a banana - E gets 1/3 and C gets 2/3, and they are both happy. Bananas are packed full of vitamins B6, C, potassium and fiber, so it's a good start to the day. For our dairy, we have historically split a cup of Greek yogurt between the girls. However, now that I'm on this whole label-reading kick, I realized the yogurt I've been feeding my girls is packed full of sugar (15g in one 5.3oz cup!). Naturally, yogurt does contain some sugars (called lactose), but this particular brand also listed additional sugars in the ingredients (evaporated cane juice is indeed sugar with a fancy name).

So once we finished up the yogurt cups we had, we decided to try our hand at making our own "fruit on the bottom" Greek yogurt. I used Costco's Kirkland Signature plain Greek yogurt (two 32oz. containers for just under $7) as the base, which contains all natural ingredients:

We have a lot of fresh fruit that we picked and froze last summer, so logically I thought that was the best place to start with fruit topping. C chose blackberry for our first flavor test, and I was really pleased with the results! I used about two cups of frozen blackberries and stuck them in the microwave to defrost for about four minutes (if I had planned ahead, I would have thawed them in the fridge overnight). Once they had softened some, I added a tiny bit of water to the bottom of the blender, threw in the blackberries, and pureed it on medium-low speed for about 30-45 seconds (just until all the chunks were broken up and the consistency was pretty smooth). I added some plain yogurt to the bowls, added a spoonful of the topping, mixed it up and voila...fruit on the bottom yogurt that only contained natural sugars from the blackberries and lactose!

The two cups of blackberries made more topping than I needed, so I took a cue from a friend of mine and froze the extra into ice cube trays for future breakfasts:

My plan is to go ahead and puree some peach, strawberry and blueberry topping as well, and pull a different one out each night to thaw in the fridge for breakfast the next day. Honestly, it isn't any more time-consuming than the store-bought yogurt cups, plus it ends up being cheaper. The two cartons of Greek yogurt make approximately 12 small cups of yogurt, and I was paying at least $5-6 more for that same amount packaged in smaller portions. And two cups of fruit made eight days worth of topping, so that ends up being pretty affordable as well.

Best part of the whole thing...my girls ate that yogurt faster than I have seen them eat yogurt in weeks. Turns out eating healthy isn't all that bad. :)