Healthy Homemade Granola

 

 

While on our recent camping trip, I was getting dressed in the tent trailer early one morning and I could hear the people in the campground next to us talking around their campfire. I wasn’t paying much attention to most of what they were saying, but I did hear one thing. By her tone, this woman was obviously a mom talking to her child, and I heard her say, “No, you can’t eat candy right now, you need some breakfast first. Now come here and decide, do you want Fruit Loops or Captain Crunch?”

 

And oh, I cringed inside! The two cereal options she gave contain more sugar than the candy that the child was trying to eat, and it will do the exact same thing to his/her blood sugar! Nutritionally, if the candy contained chocolate and/or nuts, it was probably more nutritious than the cereal that was being offered.

 

In my opinion, the cereal aisle is the most dangerous aisle in the grocery store. Nowhere else in the store are you lied to so blatantly, or tricked so completely. I could go on and on about the ingredients in cereal and the “nutritional” statements on the packaging, but the fact is that if you do find yourself in the cereal aisle, your best bet would be to grab a container of rolled oats (not instant, not the kind in the nifty packages with all the artificial flavorings added, but the ones that are hiding on the very bottom shelf) and then get out of there, quick!

 

 

Thankfully, you can make your own! Granola is the only cereal in our house. Of course, with our daughter’s nut allergies, it’s hard to find a kind that is safe for her to eat. Plus, if you check out the ingredients in store-bought granola, there are many questionable things there, too. Thankfully I found this granola recipe, and I have adapted it a bunch to fit our family’s allergies and preferences.