Granola goodness

It's getting easier and easier to eat gluten free both at home and out and about, and to my delight I discovered this weekend that one of my favourite pre-theatre restaurants, Pasta Brown in covent garden, have now started serving gluten free pasta for all their pasta dishes ... yum. This opened up a whole new part of the menu for me and I felt spoilt for choice.

One area where gluten free meals aren't so available are for brunch - most restaurants aren't yet serving gluten free bread with their breakfast options and muesli's and granola both contain gluten. This is a shame as usually these are usually the healthy brunch options and always the most appealing to me. Instead I usually end up with fruit salad and some eggs, which doesn't set me up nearly as well for the day.

But I refuse to let eating gluten and dairy free force me to go out without the yummiest of foods and so I set out to make some gluten free granola myself. So I adapted a recipe from The Kind Diet using rice flakes instead of oats and surprisingly, for a first-time recipe experiment, it actually turned out rather good and I served it up with some fresh raspberries and rice milk.

If you want to make some regular granola from this recipe, swap two cups of oats for the soaked rice flakes (don't soak the oat flakes) and bake for half the time the second time round.

Rice & Coconut Granola

Preheat the oven to 180C

Add 1 cup of water to 1 cup of rice flakes and leave to soak for 10 minutes (until the water is absorbed). Then spread out the soaked flakes on a sheet of baking paper on an oven tray and bake in the oven for 10 minutes.

Transfer the rice flakes to a bowl, add the following and mix well:

1 cup desiccated coconut

1/4 cup sunflower seeds

1/4 cup goji berries

1/4 cup chopped hazelnuts

1/4 cup flaked almonds

In a cup mix 1/4cup agave syrup, 1/8 cup grapeseed oil and 1tsp vanilla essence. Pour over the rice flake mix and stir thoroughly.

Spread the mixture over a fresh baking sheet and bake for 10 minutes. Stir around on the sheet and then bake for another 10 minutes until golden.

Take out the oven and leave to cool. Put in an air tight container and shake in 1/4 cup of ground flax seeds.