My Mum is staying with me at the moment, just for a whirlwind one week. This means two things: a trip to Mustafa is inevitable as is cooking at least one new (to me anyway) recipe.

Yesterday we made very easy, very healthy granola, containing hardly any sugar, from a recipe she’d been given by someone with the wonderfully old fashioned name of Patience, a lodge cook she met years ago up in Scotland.

On my UFIT Salveo regime sugar is off limits. Shop-bought granola is usually caked in the stuff, or in honey which is just as bad I have recently learned.

This recipe does use some honey but it’s such a small amount that I’m not counting it.  And besides, we substituted it for low G.I. agave nectar which feels even healthier.

Here’s what to do – the only tricky bit is making sure it doesn’t burn by stirring it every 10 minutes or so once it’s in the oven. If you burn it, it goes bitter and tastes horrible; if you do it right, it will have an amazing toasted sweetness to it.

PATIENCE’S GRANOLA

30ml sunflower oil or equivalent

45ml honey (which we substituted for agave nectar bought from good old FairPrice Finest)

A generous sprinkle of ground cinnamon

400g whole oats

x1 small pack almonds (around 250g)

x1 pack sunflower seeds

x1 pack pumpkin seeds

A few good handfuls of linseeds

Raisins and chopped dried apricots (add afterwards when cold)

How:

Turn oven on at 150 degrees.

Bring the oil and honey (or agave) to a boil in a roasting tin (takes about 3 seconds over the hob; the ratio of agave to oil looks something like this)

Add a sprinkle cinnamon

Add oats and other nuts/seeds

Mix everything up together with a wooden spoon, even though everything looks dry and it feels like you don’t have enough oil/honey…you do.

Put roasting pan in the oven at 150 degrees.

Keep stirring it every ten minutes to toast it (watch carefully so it does not burn; set a timer).  This takes about 45 minutes.

Let it cool completely (we made this just before going to bed one evening and left it in the oven overnight – obviously turning off the oven once the stuff was cooked.  You can’t transfer it into an airtight container until it’s properly cold as otherwise it will go soggy).

Add a handful or two of dried fruit – raisins/dried cranberries/dried apricots – when cold.

Store in an airtight container (this recipe fills one large kilner jar) and serve as a topping with fresh fruit, yoghurt etc for breakfast.

PS: The best and cheapest place to buy all the ingredients for this (more on this in my next post): Mustafa.