These granola bars are extremely easy to make and they taste “oat-standing”!

All you do is mix oats with brown sugar, melted butter and a bit of corn syrup.  Once the mixture is microwaved, you toss on some chocolate chips.  Microwave one minute more and spread the chocolate out like frosting.  Then you put them in the refrigerator and wait 30 minutes.  Once the chocolate has set, you chop them into bars or squares and enjoy.  Total active prep time is about 8 minutes.

For exact ingredients and the printable recipe, click here.

Video: How To Make Chewy Granola Bars In The Microwave w/ Kid Breakfast

You can modify the recipe by adding a handful of raisins or other small bits of dried fruit.  Same goes for chopped nuts.  As long as your additions don’t exceed 1/3 cup, the bars should still hold together well.

Quick cooking oats work a little better than Old Fashioned oats.  Quick cooking oat pieces are smaller so the final bar is slightly more condensed and holds its shape better.

If you use mini chocolate chips, you may not need to microwave the additional minute.  The heat left over from the first four minutes of microwaving is likely enough to melt the tiny chips.

The one thing I might do differently next time is to reduce the amount of chocolate just a touch.  These bars were delicious… maybe too delicious.  Less chocolate would make them more like respectable granola bars and less like the indulgent, delectable treats you see here.

When sealed in an airtight container at room temperature, the bars remain fresh and tasty for up to 10 days.

Final Verdict: These Chewy Microwave Granola Bars were “oat” of sight, man!

If you have some oats and a skillet, you’re halfway to having homemade granola.   I was skeptical about this recipe before I tried it.  I’m a big proponent of oven-baked granola.  I’ve spent months trying to find ways to make prefect granola clusters in the oven.  So, the idea of just throwing a bunch of stuff in a pan seemed like a lot of hopeful thinking.  To my surprise and delight, this recipe actually works quite well.

You end up with a looser granola than the oven produces, but it’s every bit as flavorful.  As I was making it, I couldn’t help but think how fun it would be to make this over a campfire.  I’d like to see how a little smoke from the fire affects the oats.  I’ll let you know next time I go to the forest. But for now, I used the stove-top.  Here’s how it’s done…

Melt 2 Tablespoons of butter in a skillet over medium heat.  Stir in 2 Tablespoons of honey.  Add 1/4 cup chopped nuts. Cook about 2 minutes until they start to brown – stirring often.

Add 1 cup Old Fashioned oats and mix well to moisten.  Stirring often, cook oats about 4 minutes until nicely browned.

Turn off heat and mix in 1/2 cup raisins or other dried fruit.  Transfer to a baking sheet to cool and crisp.

I found that if you compress the granola into the baking sheet with a spatula, you can get a few clusters out of this recipe.

Final Verdict:  It’s not as good as oven-baked granola, but it’s definitely satisfying. If you’re looking just to make 2 servings of homemade granola on the fly, this is a convenient recipe. It doesn’t get tremendously crisp so it’s far better as a cereal with milk than it is as a snack.  Sadly, it doesn’t store very well.  The modest amount of crispness that it gets seems to dissipate the longer it’s stored.

Suggestions For Adjusting This Recipe To Fit Your Tastes

For the 1/4 cup of nuts, just about any nut will work as long as the pieces aren’t too big.  Try chopped pecans, peanuts, chopped walnuts or even chopped macadamia nuts.  For the nut component, you could also use seeds like flax seeds, sesame seeds or pumpkin seeds.  Try mixing a couple of those options together to fill out the 1/4 cup.

For the 1/2 cup of dried fruit, I decided to use a combination of dried pineapple and chopped dates.  Those flavors worked great, but the sky is the limit when it comes to the fruit component.  You could go relativity simple with raisins or cranberries or try something unique like dried mango or papaya.  Like the nut component, it’s fun to make the flavor of your granola as interesting as possible by mixing a couple dried fruits together to make up the 1/2 cup.

If you need a homemade granola fix and you don’t have time to bake, this recipe more than satisfies the basic granola craving.

This post is a companion piece to the following recipe on MrBreakfast.com:

Skillet Granola

To check out a couple of my favorite oven-baked granola recipes, see my article called How To Make Granola With Clusters.

Also see the Homemade Cereal Collection on MrBreakfast.com for a bunch of other granola recipes.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas… in my kitchen.  It smells a lot like Christmas too.  I just made homemade granola with nutmeg, cinnamon and cranberries.  I found some adorable little gift bags at Target in the dollar section.  They have a clear plastic front so friends can see the granola – as if the oats were pressing against the window to say, “Happy Holidays! Let me out of here!”

Since I’m giving granola to friends, I thought it would be nice to give some to you, my reader-friend.  Your holiday granola comes in the form of advice.  Like the old saying goes, “Give a guy granola and he’ll eat for a day.  Give a guy granola advice and he’ll eat for a lifetime.”

I’ve been making granola for several years, but it’s only been in the last few that I’ve consistently made the kind of granola that I enjoy the most.  To me, the best granola has distinct clusters – little nuggets of crispy, clumped oats (and other good things) that crunch when you bite them.  It makes the best granola for snacking and even better granola for dousing with milk. So…

The Secret To Making Granola With Clusters

And the secret is…

It’s flour.  Just regular plain old all-purpose flour.

The ingredients in granola are very similar to those in an oatmeal cookie, minus the flour, egg and excess sugar.  If you take just one of those components (the flour) and add it to granola ingredients, you suddenly get random instances of a cookie-like quality… the clusters.  The flour helps bind some of the oats (and nuts, etc.) together.

It doesn’t take much.  A ratio of 1 part flour to 5 parts oats works best for me.  In real terms, that equates to a 1/2 cup flour to 2 and 1/2 cups oats in most of the recipe I use.  (Actual recipes below.)

More Tips For Making Successful Granola

Mix with your hands.  Any decent granola recipe will present you with a point where you mix the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients.  At this point, ditch the spoons and spatulas.  Get your hands right in there and gently squeeze the ingredients together.  Stop as soon as everything is moistened.  Since we are dealing with flour now, you want to avoid over-mixing.  The human hand squeeze technique further helps to create clusters in the final product.

Don’t overcook it.  Most of my recipes call for 15 minutes of cooking at 325, flipping the granola and then cooking it 15 minutes more.  In my early days, this always freaked me out.  After 30 minutes, the granola still seems slightly moist and hardly crisp at all.  Trust me on this… pull that granola out of the oven.  The majority of crisping happens as the granola cools.  Let it set 15 minutes and get to crunching.

Add raisins or dried fruit at the end.  Nuts love the oven.  They get, as one might say, “oven-roasted” and even tastier.  Dried fruit doesn’t fare as well.  It’s already dry and it just gets more dry in the oven… and tough and chewy.  It probably goes without saying, but anything that can melt, like chocolate chips, should be added after the granola has completely cooled.

Use vanilla.  Vanilla is a lot like salt in that it adds something to the flavor of food even if you don’t recognize the flavor as vanilla.  It helps bring out the best of other flavors.  I’m surprised how many granola recipes I see without a touch of vanilla.  I say add vanilla to everything.  A quarter teaspoon is all you need. I usually do a half.

Try maple syrup.  I used to be a honey guy.  Mind you, I’m still a “honey of a guy” as the ladies say (ladies in the 1920’s, maybe), but for as much as I love honey, its flavor is pretty basic when it’s cooked down.  It tends to translate to a nondescript sweetness.  I now use maple syrup in place of honey in most of my recipes. It adds a warmth, complexity and notes of awesome maple flavor.  Even if I’m using a recipe that’s better suited for honey, I’ll replace 1/3 of that honey with maple syrup to add a dash of mystery.  Then, it becomes like vanilla in the way that vanilla is like salt in the previous paragraph.

The Recipes:

Here’s two of my favorite recipes that make granola with lots of clusters.

Maple Pecan Granola Clusters

Holiday Spice Granola With Cranberries

You can find more granola recipes in The Homemade Cereal Section of MrBreakfast.com.

For tips on turning homemade granola into cool Christmas gifts, check out the part of the site called Breakfast In A Jar!

Happy Holidays Everybody!

Whenever I’m in a coffee shop, I lust over all those delectable pastries imprisoned behind that glass display case.  The Lemon Poppy Seed Muffin is always one of my favorites.  It has a light, refreshing taste, and goes equally well with coffee or tea, morning or afternoon. I decided to take those flavors and incorporate them into one of my favorite homemade snacks: granola.  This time around, I wanted a granola with LOTS of clusters and I’m happy to say that’s how it turned out.

This granola is inexpensive, easy to make and terrifically versatile!  I enjoy it as cereal (of course) but also as a crunchy topping for oatmeal and yogurt, as a stand-alone snack right out of the container, as a crispy “streusel” topping for cobblers and quick breads…  Homemade granola is a kitchen staple at the MrBreakfast Estate.

To make homemade granola, you really only need a few basic ingredients that most everyone already has in their pantry.  For the ingredients list and a printable recipe, click here.

In a large bowl, mix together the oats, flour, brown sugar, zest of 1 lemon, poppy seeds, salt and slivered almonds.  In a microwave safe bowl, melt the butter and stir in the maple syrup, honey and vanilla.

Add the butter mixture to the dry ingredients and stir it up with a wooden spoon to combine.

Spread the granola mixture out over a lightly greased baking sheet. (It should resemble a very thick, sticky, lumpy cookie dough.)  Press the granola down to make a large “cookie” that covers most of the sheet.  It won’t seem like granola at this stage, but once it bakes, it will easily crumble into the granola clusters you’re more accustomed to seeing.  (Note: At this stage it’s VERY sticky, so it’s much easier to make the layer even if you cover it with a sheet of waxed paper and smooth out the granola mixture.)

Bake for 15 minutes at 350 degrees. Flip the granola and bake an additional 15 minutes. Note: When you flip the granola, it is easiest to break it up into large pieces to flip. In the end, it all gets crumbled-so don’t worry about how many pieces it breaks up into!

One last step: remove the granola from the oven and reduce the heat to 300 degrees F. Use a wooden spoon to break up the pieces into bite size clusters. Add dried blueberries (if you’re using them – you don’t have to – but I really love lemon and blueberry together) and bake it 10 more minutes at 300 degrees.

At this point, keep a good eye on the oven.  You want the clusters to be golden brown – but watch to make sure they don’t get too brown.  After 10 minutes, remove the cookie sheet from oven. Allow the granola to cool completely before serving or storing.  When the granola is fresh out of the oven, it will look soft and crumbly.  Don’t let this fool you.  As soon as it cools, it will be perfectly crisp and crunchy.

The best part about making granola is that your imagination’s the limit when it comes to flavors.  Simply swap out the lemon zest and poppy seeds with coconut and dried pineapple for a tropical version.  Or flax seeds and walnuts for a super-Omega-3 granola. Or shred 1 apple, add a teaspoon of cinnamon and pecans for one my favorite flavors – Apple Pie Granola!

Can poppy seeds make you fail a drug test?

There isn’t one definitive answer, but usually, NO.  You would have to eat the equivalent of at least 15-20 poppy seed bagels (or 10 bowls of this granola!) in one day for trace amounts of opiates to be found in your bloodstream. That being said, there are several kinds of drug tests. Some tests flag ANY amount of opiates in your bloodstream, but most flag only the specific chemical compounds in heroin and prescription painkillers.  But, there have been accusations from people (who failed their drug test) who claim they had not used any illegal nor prescription drugs.  For this reason, most states have increased the minimum level of opiates that must be detected in order to designate a “positive” result.  All signs point to something fishy going on with people who claim the “poppy seed defense” – so unless you’re throwing back poppy seeds by the handful, you shouldn’t worry. 

This post is a companion piece to the following recipe on MrBreakfast.com:

Lemon Poppy Seed Granola Clusters