I have always had a love/hate relationship with granola.  You see, I love to eat granola, but I am often put off by the extremely high-fat, high calorie granola that comes with the itty bitty service size.  Some different brands of granola I have tried have as much as 10-12 grams of fat per serving.  I love chocolate far too much to be wasting those fat calories on granola so I passed on granola for ages, until now.

I feel like the skies cleared once I started making this recipe.  It is so flipping good.  One of the main things I love about this recipe is how versatile it is.  The base includes oats, crisp rice cereal, coconut oil and either maple syrup or maple flavored agave syrup (I am sure that honey would taste delicious here as well.)  All the other ingredients can be included, excluded and/or swapped out based on what you have on hand.  I included chia seeds and hemp harts in this granola recipe due to their nutritional benefits.  However, if you don’t have those ingredients, by all means leave one or both of them out.  Same goes for the almonds.  You may also notice that I have excluded dry fruit from this recipe.  I did this because I actually prefer to enjoy this granola with fresh fruit and I find dried fruit to be extremely calorie dense and overly sweet.