TVP™ Granola

I was thrilled to come up with this recipe because my kids love cereal, and this is a delicious alternative to plain ol' oatmeal. Be careful when you are making it, if your oven is hot, it will brown a very dark brown. It won't be burnt and it won't taste burnt, but it sure LOOKS...dark!

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees.

Combine the oats, wheat germ, almonds, cashews and salt.

In a separate bowl, combine the remaining ingredients. Pour over dry ingredients and mix well. Spread out and bake on a two baking sheet for 15-20 minutes.

Turn the mixture over and bake 15-20 minutes longer, or until crunchy. If your oven doesn't get it crunch dry, you may want to leave cereal in and turn off oven, let sit an extra hour.

Total recipe yield = about 9 cups. Makes 36 two blocks servings when each served with one cup of skim milk or soy milk. Each two block serving is ¼ cup cereal.

Theory behind the recipe--

Nuts have fat. I decided I wanted my fat to come from the cereal and my protein and carbs from the milk. Get your protein and carbs from the milk. Cereal calls for milk, so I have left room for you to add it, even if you don't pour it over the top of the cereal. Non-fat yogurt can be used the same way, ½ cup of the plain. You can add some fruit flavoring to the yogurt, like Watkins' Raspberrry or Strawberry or Banana to the yogurt along with some fructose, and not change the balance of the recipe.

I usually don't mess with subtracting out the dietary fiber, but this particular recipe has so many high fiber ingredients, I decided to do it. If you normally don't subtract it out, and you have been eating exclusively from the favorable carbohydrate list and sometimes find you are alert but HUNGRY, you may not be getting enough carbohydrates. The dietary fiber in a food should be subtracted from the total amount of carbohydrates you are consuming. Why? Read all about it in my FAQ page.

This is great to make up ahead of time to have in the cabinet or in your travel bag or in a plastic cereal container.

Be careful when you buy soynuts. Many people have gone out and just bought roasted soynuts, only to come home and read the label and find out that they are chocked full of FAT. That is because they are not DRY ROASTED. If you have not tried the Dry Roasted Soynuts from Karen's Kitchen Shop, now is the time! Otherwise read the labels VERY CAREFULLY...