I'll put milk on my cereal, in my coffee, and I'll drink it with chocolate or Kahlua in it. Maybe on a cold day in winter, I'll heat up some with vanilla and honey. And...yeah, that's about it.
I hear all that hoopla about calcium, so I pop a couple of those chocolate chews and call my bones good. The boys drink soy milk, and that is supposed to be full of calcium. And soy, I hear tell, is good for women of my age--you know, those of us racing to menopause?
But I can't get past the color of soy milk.
My friend Malea used to work at this yoga/healthfood joint and she made almond milk there. After pestering her with," how do they milk an almond?" questions and, "if it has a nipple, I can milk it!" quotes she gave me the recipe. Really- it's way more work than I care to do. But I was at the store, picking up the boy's soy milk, and the same manufacturer had almond milk. When I got home I felt brave and took a sip.
It tasted like a vanilla milkshake.
Low in calories, high in all that other good stuff of milk...I set out on a blender bender one morning to make smoothies with it. If a milkshake is good, a milkshake with fruit is better!
Smoothies aren't hard to make...my normal recipe is one container of yogurt, one yogurt container of water, and frozen fruit. "Liquify" is what the button I push on the blender says.
This day I used the almond milk instead of yogurt for two recipes, and both make two reasonable, or one giganto, servings.
In my humble opinion, the best of the two::
Berry Good Smoothie
1 cup of Almond Milk
1 packet of splenda
1 cup of frozen blueberries
1/2 cup of frozen blackberries
LIQUIFY!
It tasted like berry pie.
I like pie. I like pumpkin pie. Just yesterday I had a Pumpkin Pie shake from Sonic (for dinner...hush, like you never had ice cream for dinner? Or drank your dinner? No? Don't judge, it leaves wrinkles.)
I wondered if I could whip up a low cal substitute. It was pretty good, probably would have been better if I waited for another day. I was kinda sloshing around at this point.
Pump Up the Pumpkin Pie Smoothie
1 cup almond milk
8 ice cubes
1/2 package pumpkin pie pudding mix (This is seasonal, I had hoarded boxes last winter)
Shot of pumpkin pie spice.
LIQUIFY!
Pudding doesn't set with soy milk, and I suspect it doesn't set with almond milk either, but the texture was still pretty thick. Not Sonic Shake thick, but my middle won't be Sonic Shake Thick drinking these instead of those. Sorry Sonic. (But you will still get my Diet Cherry Limeade, extra cherries, order at happy hour.)
I'm going to play around with this stuff for a while, but if you come up with a delish combination, let me know!
I have never seen pumpkin pie flavored pudding! Wow! And, I love your "permenopausal pig out" tag (or whatever it was).
ReplyDeleteThanks for the mention...teehee...I feel a little like a rock star now.
I too can't get past the color of soy milk. I have yet to see a brand that doesn't have an odd color. We really like rice milk though, but almond milk is the yummiest. Too bad my boy is allergic to almonds. I LOVE Almond Breeze brand almond milk, but it can be hard to find. Oat milk is also yummy, and hemp milk is really creamy (but also really expensive).
What if you made the pumpkin pie smoothie with just canned pumpkin instead of the pudding? That would knock out a lot of the sugar. You could add the sweetener of your choice and the pp spices. I do this once in a while with regular milk. I'll have to try the almond milk :)
ReplyDeleteTry making rice pudding w/ it sometime. We've used coconut milk for this too....
ReplyDelete