Mmmm! Homemade granola!

We LOVE granola cereal here . . . but it's hard to justify the hefty price tag at the grocery store when it's sooooo easy to make at home! Here are two of our favorites:

Granola

3 1/2 cups oatmeal

1 cup whole wheat flour

1/2 cup honey (can use more)

1/3 cup coconut oil, melted

1/4 - 1/2 cup of any of the following: raisins, craisins, sunflower seeds, coconut, slivered almonds

(I often throw in some wheat germ and ground flax seed as well)

Directions: Preheat oven to 200 degrees. Heat honey and oil on stove until liquidy. Mix all dry ingredients in a large bowl. Add honey and oil mixture; stir until everything is moist. Bake in 13x9 pan for 30-60 minutes (depending on how crisp you want your granola to be). I bake mine for 60 minutes. Also, I've found that we like it better when the raisins and/or craisins are added when the granola comes out of the oven; otherwise, they dry out too much if they're in while you bake it.

This is a very forgiving recipe -- you really can't mess it up! And I usually make at least a double batch so it lasts a few days! ;)

Peanut Butter Granola

(this recipe is from another FIAR mom -- thanks, Rebecca!)

2 tablespoons butter

1/3 cup peanut butter

Melt these two ingredients together until smooth, over low heat. Then stir in:

1/3 cup honey

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

1/4 teaspoon salt

When all ingredients are warm and smooth, stir in 3 cups of rolled oats until well coated. Put the oat mixture on an ungreased cookie sheet or 13x9 pan. Bake at 375 for approximately 10 minutes, or until crisp. At this point, you can toss in raisins, craisins, sunflower seeds, etc. Then cool and store tightly covered.

This is especially delicious with sliced bananas on top! Yummy!

Making bread

Back before Christmas, my wonderful husband blessed me by purchasing a new heavy-duty Bosch mixer and a Nutrimill for grinding our own flour. It was an exciting day when two big boxes were delivered to our home!
I've been using the Bosch mixer since we received it, but I had trouble finding a place to purchase wheat berries locally so as not to pay a lot for shipping. However, I finally found a place to buy wheat berries in bulk -- organic, no less -- so yesterday was the day to try the grain mill out! (A fun "home ec" day at GodSeekers Academy!)

Lael and Jaden were so excited to get started! They helped me unpack the Nutrimill and put everything together. We looked at the different parts of the machine to learn what each part does. Then it was time to add the wheat berries to the hopper.

Here are the wheat berries before grinding -- they look like brown rice. We started by grinding just two cups of wheat berries -- this would need to be discarded to make sure any dust or other contaminants on the Nutrimill were discarded as well.

Grinding grain is a bit noisy!
And here is the freshly-milled whole wheat flour!

What to do with flour you can't bake with! Why, play with it, of course!

Once the flour was milled, we made our bread dough, using this recipe:

6 cups warm water

1 cup sugar

1 cup oil

3 T. yeast

2 T. salt

1 cup vital wheat gluten

16 cups whole wheat flour (approximate, may be slightly more or less)

Combine water, sugar and yeast and let sit for 5 minutes to "wake up" the yeast. Add all the remaining ingredients and knead for 7-9 minutes. Divide dough into 6 pieces, shape loaves and put into pans to rise (covered, for 30-50 minutes depending on how warm or cold the room is).

Bake at 350 degrees F for 28 - 30 minutes.

This makes 6 regular size loaves of bread OR 4 loaves of bread and one batch of monkey bread (that's what's in the bundt pan)

This recipe is FANTASTIC! (Thanks to Tristan for sharing it!) It makes perfect whole wheat bread -- with the consistency of store-bought bread.
And the monkey bread is so yummy too! I only have 4 bread pans, so I had to figure out something to do with the rest of the dough ;)