Five good reasons to switch up your traditional homemade holiday gifts from cookies to granola.

  1. It couldn’t be simpler to make and your kitchen will smell like orange, cinnamon and toasted nuts and coconut for days.
  2. It’s the perfect gift to go low- to no-waste by buying ingredients in bulk with your own containers, sourcing local like my neighbour’s walnuts, and packaging in use-again Mason jars labelled with easily washed off http://www.wineglasswriter.com Wine Glass Writers.
  3. Granola has a longer shelf-life than cookies and it’s filled with healthy ingredients like nuts, seeds, grains and dried fruit.
  4. It’s amazing as a breakfast cereal or sprinkled on yoghurt.
  5. Invite over a group of friends and make a really really large batch (like 64 quart jars), put on some Christmas tunes and drink a little wine or cider.

Christmas Granola recipe

Ingredients for six cups of granola (just multiply everything for bigger batches)

  • Four cups quick or old-fashioned, uncooked oats
  • 1/2 cup shredded coconut
  • 1/2 cup chopped pecans, walnuts or hazelnuts or a combination of all three
  • 1 tablespoon wheat bran
  • 1 tablespoon wheat germ
  • 1/4 raw unsalted sunflower seeds
  • 1/4 cup butter, melted
  • 1/2 cup of local honey
  • 2 teaspoons grated orange peel
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1/4 teaspoon fresh-ground nutmeg
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1 1/3 cups dried cranberries
Ingredients for many batches of this recipe and some of the jar decorating supplies.

Easy baking directions

Pre-heat oven to 350 F. (We also used our wood fired oven. If you are lucky enough to have one… fire it up to pizza-baking temperature or very hot, burn down the coals and then remove and cool to about 180 C… basically the temperature you would use to make bread.)

Use your oven or if you have one, granola bakes well in a wood-fired oven.

Mix all the ingredients together except the dried cranberries, (which are added after the granola is toasted) in a large bowl. Spread the granola onto cookie sheets or other suitable baking pans.

Bake for 40 minutes stirring the granola every 10 minutes so it toasts evenly. The granola should be a nice even toasted brown colour when its done.

Cool and then add the dried cranberries and mix.

Decorate your jars

Cut squares of a Christmas fabric to cover your jar lids, tie on some greenery or berries with raffia and label the jars with handy dandy Wine Glass Writers. Christmas scents will hit you as soon as you open the beautiful re-useable containers.