Cold cereal for breakfast

Why is a healthy cereal somewhere upwards of $5 a box?  There also seemed to be so much sugar and salt even in the healthier cereals.  My son usually keeps us stocked with big batches of homemade granola, but we were out so I thought I might pick up a box of cereal until he had time to make another batch.   I was hankering for something crunchy that didn't taste like the box it came in but wasn't looking to break the bank. As was often said when I was growing up, "we can make that better at home."  So I came home empty handed from the cereal aisle.

I found a recipe with a video for Healthy Cold Cereal at the Healthy Home Economist website.  Here are the options I chose and changes I made to the recipe to make it work for my time constraints:

- I used 1 cup of yogurt (all I had left) and 2 cups of almond milk

- I added 1/3 cup flax seeds to the flour mixture

- Substituted 1 cup of oats for 1 cup of the whole wheat flour

- I omitted the salt

- I used honey as my sweetener

- I didn't soak the mixture overnight because I wanted my cereal for the next morning

- I added 1 cup of chopped walnuts to the pan after crumbling the cake into large pieces

- Instead of the 12 hour dehydrating step, I set the oven at 300 degrees and baked the crumbled cake spread out on 2 cookie sheets for about 1 hour, stirring every 20 minutes and watching carefully so it didn't get too dark at the higher temperature. (As you can see, I was really intent on having this cereal the next morning.)

- Added 1 cup of raisins while the cereal cooled.  Sunflower or pumpkin seeds or other dried fruits would also be good additions.

As you can see in the photo below, my speedier version worked just fine,  It had plenty of crunch, was made with whole foods and tastes a bit like having oatmeal or gingerbread cookies.  

I topped the bowl with some of my bumper crop of raspberries and some almond milk - yum!  For perhaps just a bit more than the cost of one box of the store bought cereal, I came out with two gallon sized storage bags of the homemade version with no added salt and just the amount of sweetness I wanted.  If you like cold cereal, I hope you give this easy recipe a try. 

Thanks for stopping by!

Late summer flower from my neighbor's garden