Honey Granola with Pumpkin Pie Spice

Honey Granola with Pumpkin Pie Spice

4 C rolled oats (not quick oats)
1 Cup nuts (whole or pieces) (suggested: almonds, pecans, walnuts, filberts, pumpkin seeds)
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1/2 tsp pumpkin pie spice (or 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon, pinch of nutmeg, pinch of clove)

1/4 Cup vegetable oil
1/4 Cup washed cane sugar (white sugar)
1/2 teaspoon molasses
1/2 Cup honey
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (optional)
1 1/2 Cups raisins and/or other dried fruit (added while cooling)

Preheat oven to 300° F. Lightly grease a 13" x 9" pan with deep sides.

Mix oats, salt, and spices in a bowl and set aside.

In a saucepan, combine oil, sugar, molasses, and honey. Warm until incorporated. (Do not boil.) Stir in the vanilla extract.

Carefully pour the warm honey mixture over the oat mixture and fold it in.  Spread the combination into your pan.

Bake for 40 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes. Check in the last 5 minutes because oven times vary.
When it is done and cooling, stir in the dried fruit. Scrape the granola loose from the pan while warm; this will reduce the amount of sticking to the pan when cool. Allow it to cool completely before storing in an air-tight container. It will keep at room temperature for up to one week.

If you like clusters, I recommend using baking parchment instead of greasing the pan. That will allow you to leave the mix until completely cool, which is how you get clusters. Otherwise, when you scrape the granola loose, you break the granola into a looser, muesli-like cereal. Increase the sugar by 1/4 Cup and decrease the honey by the same amount for a harder, sweeter granola.

Granola is one of those things that is expensive when store-bought, but can be marvelously cheap if you make it yourself -- especially if you are using up ingredients on hand. It is one of those straightforward recipes that work consistently, as long as you follow the easy instructions. Stirring every 10 minutes is vital, or else the granola will not toast evenly, and it will burn instead.

It's a superb use for crystalized honey. Honey is often expensive these days, but if you have a Farmers Market, there is often a honey vendor who sells better honey than the supermarket for a lower price. If you have a Trader Joe's store near you, their mesquite honey is perfectly suitable and as low as $10 for a 3 pound container.

Have you noticed that when you buy a bottle of molasses for holiday gingerbread, you still have most of a bottle well past New Years? Other granola recipes ask for brown sugar, but I use my brown sugar up on a regular basis. Regular sugar and molasses take the place of brown sugar in this recipe. (Brown sugar is sugar where the molasses has been returned to it after the first stages of refining.)

Pumpkin pie spice is another one of those things that shows up around the holidays but has limited use, unless you like a lot of things to taste like pumpkin pie. If you have it, it's a good shortcut for this recipe. If not, cinnamon is the vital spice in this recipe. Clove, nutmeg, ground ginger, and even cardamom are merely accents.

Oats can be purchased from the bulk section of grocery stores and co-ops for lowest cost. I usually have oats on hand, but I'm not good about eating oatmeal often enough to use my oats up fast. I'm a big fan of granola, which is full of crunchy goodness, spice, and sweet. I first decided to try my hand at granola because I was concerned that my oats had been hanging around too long, and might be getting a little stale. I had some nuts in shells left over from holiday nuts, and raisins that had been forgotten until they lost all plumpness.

I made this batch with "plumasins," little pieces of dried plum. Previous batches had dried apricots that I chopped into fine pieces. If you aren't a fan of raisins, there are a lot of options. I may try drying some backyard tree apples to use in granola later.