Milk.

Before I delve into this allow me to affirm that I don't claim to be an expert. I didn't go to school for this stuff. I'm just a person with a lot of downtime at work who wants to be healthy, feel awesome, live long and look good. I don't have any certificates or accreditation but I do have a curious mind and access to Google.

My coworker (one that I like) told me she stopped drinking cow's milk.After some thought, it makes sense. Cows feed their young from their bodies with their milk the way we do as humans. When babies and calves grow up, they don't drink their mother's milk anymore. Cows' milk is not intended for human consumption.

Even if it were, the dairy industry messes with it so much; adds hormones, antibiotics, pasteurizes and homogenizes to the point where the cartons we buy in the grocery store are so far removed from what actually comes out of the cow's udder. Buying organic milk sounds like the next logical step but at my grocery store the only thing that separates the conventional milk from the organic milk is that the organic milk isn't treated with "synthetic growth hormone." Why should I pay more for this again? I don't want to.

So I thought okay hmmm if I buy an organic non dairy milk I can pretty much guarantee I won't get any added hormones or pesticides so I grabbed some soy milk. Silly me. I didn't read the ingredient list. Until my second round of purchasing this fluid (which cost me about 1 cent per ounce less than organic cow's milk) I had been blending my daily smoothie fruit with a processed food fortified with vitamins whose second ingredient was sugar!

Now. I HAVE to have milk in my smoothie. If I don't, it's a slushie and that's not okay. I gotta have that creamy texture or I'll be sad. Determined to find an unsweetened non dairy milk that hadn't been so highly processed that they'd have to make it vitamin fortified, I looked at every single carton at Wegmans.No dice.Organic does not mean unprocessed!

I decided the only way to find a smoothie base with less than 5 ingredients was to make it myself on my own kitchen counter. A lot of recipes I found for Almond milk required soaking, whirring and straining. I wanted fewer steps so here's what I did.

[Picture here]
Oh yeah that's right I don't have a camera! Well if I did, this would be a picture of a 1/4 cup of blanched almonds sitting in 1 cup of water in my blender. They sit over night.

The next picture would be me whirring my almond and water mixture in the blender.

The next picture is me adding 2 handfuls of mixed greens, some chia seeds and frozen cherries.

The next picture is me taking a drink of a green-brown mixture that's way to grainy and leafy and making a disgusted face.

The next few pictures show me adding honey and bananas and stevia and even the wretched forbidden cow's milk to the mixture to try to get it drinkable. Finally I succeed and I suck it down in time to leave for work.

The next montage shows this morning's endeavor to perfect it.
Soak almonds over night. This time I poured off a little water before blending. Then I added the chia seed and let them do their jelly thing. Then I added frozen strawberries and half a room temp ripe banana, a little coconut oil and blended. I left out the greens so I could have a control in my experiment.

The results! Tasty! LOTS better than yesterday. The texture is a little grainy because of the little almond chunks I didn't strain because...well I want as few steps as possible. And I'm sure that if I threw out the pasty almond pulp, I'd be throwing out some nutrients too. I want to keep the nutrients, they're my friends.

Tomorrow I shall add the grreens back in and see what happens!