JM'S GRANOLA

Hello and welcome to The Kitchen! I am so excited to share with you and learn with you as we embark on this journey of cooking, eating, giving and whatever else comes across these pages. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Elizabeth Mosser and Diane is my amazing mom. I have been married to my incredible husband, Brook, for 5 years and we have a 2.5 year old son, Duke, and a baby girl due in April.

(Brook, Duke and I)

One of the greatest gifts my mother gave me was allowing me to be at her side in the kitchen as I grew up. My mom made a meal for our family every single night and she allowed (and sometimes required) my sister and I to help her in the kitchen everyday. I'm sure there were times when I was anything but "helpful" and yet she patiently taught me and encouraged me to love and serve people through cooking.

As soon as I got married, I realized what a gift that really was. Men love to eat! The past five years have been a journey of relearning and rethinking what I thought was a healthy way of eating and learning how to eat REAL foods, the way God created them. I plan to share bits and pieces of that story with you over the next few weeks and months and share with you what I have learned... and am still learning.

My goal on these pages is to encourage you and inspire you to feed yourself, your family and everyone who eats at your table with really good, real, whole foods.

Here are a few things you should know before we start cooking...

I am a total perfectionist and I love to follow the rules. However, for some strange reason, I hate to follow recipes. I like to think of recipes as "ideas" and then create whatever comes to mind. I also hate to measure ingridients. There is one major problem with these two things: how do you share a recipe on a blog when you don't write it down or know how much you used of anything?! So, I am turning over a new leaf and vowing to give you all actual recipes... therfore I will measure... most of the time... and record what I do in order to share with you all.

With that said, I want you to have free reign to change, substitute and adapt any of these recipes to your taste and accourding to what is in your pantry. Feel free to send in questions as well and I will do my best to answer them.

Lastly, Duke and I have some food sensitivties/allergies so you will find that most of my recipes are dairy free and often wheat/gluten free. I will try to always give you options to make every recipe with OR without dairy or gluten so you can modify them to fit who your are feeding them to.

I hope you have as much fun with these recipes as I do!

Elizabeth

JM’S GRANOLA

This recipe was born out of my brother, John Mark’s, request for some hearty granola. He wanted one with lots of nuts and real ingredients. After a few batches that were only “so, so”, I finally arrived at this recipe and we have stuck with it ever since.

Ingredients:

5 cups old fashioned rolled oats

¾ cup raw almonds

¾ cup pecans

*you can use any kind of your favorite nuts. Just make sure they don't contain any added oils or salt. If you don't want it quite as nutty, simply use less nuts.

½ cup organic brown sugar (optional)

3 t ground cinnamon

1 t sea salt

¾ cup unsweetened applesauce

¼ cup maple syrup

¼ cup honey

2 T of coconut oil

1 T real vanilla

1 cup raisins

Preheat oven to 300F.

Mix together applesauce, maple syrup, honey and coconut oil in a small bowl.

Combine oats, almonds, pecans, brown sugar, cinnamon and salt in a large bowl.

Pour wet ingredients over dry ingredients and stir until completely combined.

Spread over two cookie sheets in a thin layer and bake for 25 min, then flip over with a spatula and put back in the oven.

Bake for another 25 min. Then turn up the oven to 315F for about another 10 – 15 minutes (this allows it to brown up a bit more and get crispier). Keep a close eye on it and take it out when it is evenly brown on top and feels dry.

IMPORTANT: let it cool completely on the trays before you move it! This allows the clusters to stay together.

Once it has completely cooled, move to a large bowl and stir in the raisins.

Store in an airtight container.

We eat ours with unsweetened vanilla almond milk and fresh fruit or sprinkle some on greek yogurt… or eat it by the handful!

ENJOY!