Amongst the foods we can now enjoy (and pay for) in health-conscious, unprocessed, community-minded, brand-as-political-statement form is granola.  And folks charge an arm and a leg for it once it steps off the industrial-agriculture train.

But granola is easy, cheap, and quick to make at home. PitchKnives’s lowers cholesterol, contains lots of omegas and vitamins, and is a fiber powerhouse.  It contains significant protein, iron, magnesium, and zinc.

We’ve dubbed one of the versions I’ve developed A Date with Ginger Rogers.  It includes dates and ginger.  And it’s tasty as hell.  Ahh yes, we are clever.Our ingredients:

5 cups of old fashioned oatmeal
¾ cup of oat bran
½ cup of wheat bran
¾ cup of pepitas (raw pumpkin seeds)
¾ cup raw, unsalted sunflower seeds
1 ½ tbs of cinnamon
1 ½ tbs of ground ginger
pinch of salt
1 cup olive oil
¾ cup honey
2 cups diced dates
2 cups roughly chopped almonds

The last two ingredients are frequently available at inexpensive prices by grocers offering bulk ingredients sold by weight.

To start, we mix all of the grains and spices. If you want to be super bad, grate some fresh ginger to add to or substitute for the powdered variety. Peel the skin of the ginger root with a regular old vegetable peeler and grate the root with a cheese grater. Pull the longest of the stringy fibers out, though they’ll mostly be cooked down, so that’s not the biggest deal.

In a separate container, mix the olive oil and honey. Stir this together well and pour it into the grain-spice mixture, stopping two or three times to stir the grains and to recombine the oil and honey with another good stir.

Spread the mixture out on a baking sheet at a thickness of about one inch. Bake at 300˚ for twenty-five minutes. Remove the baking sheet, stir in the dates and almonds, and continue cooking for roughly fifteen minutes.

Sealed in an airtight container, this will keep for a few weeks at minimum. You can freeze it indefinitely.