I've been making homemade granola quite a bit lately, and I thought I'd share my process.

Granola is super simple. You mix together oats, honey, oil, and a bit of salt, and toast it in the oven (or on top of the stove, if you don't have an oven). When I was looking up recipes, most of them seemed to use the following proportions, so this is what I've been doing:

For every 3 cups of oats, you need:
- 1/3 cup honey
- 1/4 cup oil (I've used canola oil or olive oil)
- a small pinch of salt

Scale as needed. :) I usually do it for 6 cups of oats at a time. So: 6 cups oats, 2/3 cup honey, 1/2 cup oil. The proportions are the important thing, so if you're using some other measurements, it's a 1:9 ratio on the honey to oats, and 1:12 on the oil to oats. (I also prefer a slightly less sweet granola. You might prefer a little more or less honey in the mix, depending on your tastes.)

I put the honey in a measuring cup and microwave it for 30-45 seconds so that it's easy to pour. Then I mix the oil into it (it doesn't really mix, but that doesn't matter) and gently stir it into the oats with a big wooden spoon.

Most recipes say to use a cookie sheet for toasting the oats, but I've been doing it in a large cast-iron skillet. Anything that will fit in an oven, I guess, and has high enough sides that you can stir it without spilling oats all over the bottom of the oven. You can also do it on top of the stove in a large covered skillet. I toast the oats until they're more or less uniformly golden, which takes about an hour (or a bit longer; our oven tends to run cool), stirring occasionally, especially towards the end to get them all exposed to the heat.

You can put in any extras that you like (nuts, dried fruit, shredded coconut, etc). One thing I discovered is that if you do this at the start of the process, you'll end up with hard, tooth-breaking bits of fossilized fruit and/or nuts by the time the oats are toasted. I usually do the toasting beforehand and then, while the granola is still warm and easy to stir, mix in chopped nuts and fruits. This also means that if you need to cater to different family members' tastes, or want to try small batches with different mix-ins, you can divide the toasted granola beforehand and then mix different add-ons into the different batches.

And there's your granola, suitable for cereal, dessert toppings or whatever you like to use granola for! It's not really labor-intensive at all; you just need an hour/hour-and-a-half when you can babysit the stove while doing other things.