Bento for Baby Recipe: Grown-up Granola

I've been making granola at home for a few months now.  My husband is a bit obsessed with it.  I like it a lot better than any store bought cereal.  For the adults, I make a recipe that combines a recipe by Melissa Clark from the New York Times where she tested how little sugar you can use in a popular recipe for olive oil granola and still end up with tasty results, and a great recipe by David Lebovitz that uses unsweetened apple sauce in place of some of the oil.  For Baby Girl, I make a granola with unsweetened apple sauce and no added refined sugar.  She loves it.

You can certainly adapt the nuts and dried fruit to your tastes, but this is our favorite combination.

Ingredients:

5 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
1/2 cup organic unsweetened apple sauce
5 tablespoons real maple syrup
1/2 cup olive oil
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon (heaping)
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1 cup walnut pieces
1 cup sliced almonds
1 cup grated coconut
1/2 cup flax seed meal
1 cup sweetened dried cherries

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix all the ingredients thoroughly in a large bowl.  I like to mix in the flax seed meal after stirring everything else together.  That keeps the finely ground flax seed meal from coating everything and inhibiting clumping.  Clumps are the best part of granola!

Spread mixture out on a sheet tray and press it into an even layer with a spatula.  Bake in oven until lightly browned, about 40 minutes.  Stir the granola every 10 to 15 minutes, compressing with spatula after every stirring to ensure granola clumps together.

Cool completely and then mix in the dried cherries.  Store in an airtight container.