Make Your Own Almond Milk

Not only can you make any almond milk at home, but it also tastes better, has fewer ingredients, and can be customized at least a hundred different ways. Soak your almonds overnight for a creamier milk.

Almond milk Recipe: Almond Milk

Almond milk is a raw food staple. It is quick to make, delicious as a chilled drink, and used in many recipes.

1 cup raw almonds (you can also make the same recipe with using other raw nuts)
2 cups water
6 or more pitted dates, OR honey, or maple syrup ti taste
1/4 tsp Celtic Sea salt

Blend the nuts and water in a blender for around 30 seconds. Pour the mixture through a fine mesh bag or juice bag*, or into cheesecloth and squeeze to strain it and separate the pulp from the milk. Almond milk is good just like this, but adding some sweet and salt makes it even better. Put the milk back into the blender and add 6 dates and 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Taste it, if you like it sweeter keep adding dates 2 or 3 at a time until it is as sweet as you would like. You can also use one or more tablespoons of honey to sweeten it instead of the dates.
The left over pulp can be made into cookies or crackers in a dehydrator, or made into many kinds of confections by adding such things as: raw carob powder, honey, chopped apple, dates, cinnamon, banana, coconut - then made into small balls or bars. Try some experimenting with it!

Here is a link to Almond Milk Bags to strain your milk from the pulp:
https://www.amazon.com/PRO-QUALITY-NUT-MILK-BAG/…/B00KLT6X9W

Here is a link to my Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/Vegans-and-Raw-Foodies-172654636111420/

Hacking Life With a Daily Routine

One way to keep a healthy lifestyle is to have a daily routine. You can't really stay entirely healthy without some kind of routine. It really doesn't matter how healthy you eat (which is hard without some goals and routine anyhow), you still need to exercise, and have other goals to keep you in a well-rounded healthy lifestyle. So I thought I would share something with you that has made a lasting impact on me. One way is hacking life.

I like to hack life, and I love to find ways to make life easier by doing everything opposite than most people. I went to Disney World and never stood in a line years ago, by finding ways to do opposite of what everyone else did. I hacked my printer and tore it apart to make ink costs go down, it only costs me about $30.00 for colored ink now, per year, and I print non-stop. No, I don’t use those silly refill kits that make your hands full of ink. I have a system I use OUTSIDE of my printer. I also like memorization techniques, and anything to make my college studies easier. Finally, I love the concept of what is called habit-stacking. There are books on habit stacking that are great and I recommend them if your life is absolutely falling apart, or if you need a better routine.

I read this book called Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod, yes, it is a self-help book…. I will spare you the necessity to read it, unless your life seems to be unfulfilling and you need something or anything to help you out. If you decide to read it, it is a very easy read, and should only take a couple days to read it, depending how much time you have. It is a bit of a flaky read, but if you take the principles and apply them, they really do work, I can attest to that, and I have many examples for evidence. I will not be mentioning them all here, but if you would like to know the examples, let me know and I will be happy to write all about that sometime.

The book tells you to do six things when you get up. Most people will need to get up a little earlier than their normal times if life pulls them out the door early in the day after their cup of coffee. Here are the six things that you should do for ten minutes each to make a total of one hour per day.

1) Read: this takes me longer, for ten minutes just doesn’t hit the mark for me. But most mornings when rushed it is what I lean on. I read every evening, so it doesn’t really matter. I am constantly reading for course material, so reading what I really want to read becomes challenging sometimes. This is good for your brain.

2) Exercise: I have a tiny trampoline in my house and I jump like a mad person while listening to fast music. This is a very inexpensive and simple way to get your metabolism going for the day.

3) Self Affirmations: Yes, talk out loud to yourself and lift yourself up. Only say positive things, even if you don’t believe any of it. In my experience, your mind will catch up with the proclamations you make. I have examples of this working. Most people will find this part hard to do and feel that talking to yourself is crazy. But I don’t since I find absolute joy in doing most things opposite than the crowd.

4) Silence yourself: Just relax, go outside and sit on your porch, close your eyes and breathe while listening to the sounds of the birds. This is easy for me to do as I live in the country and it’s quiet here. So, wherever you can find a quiet place, be good to yourself and do this.

5) Visualize: I remember when I was a kid (seventh grade) and wanted this certain bike. I cut out the picture from one of those big huge Sears catalogs and taped it on my dresser in my room. I would think about all the ways to get that bike. I got a job as a newspaper carrier and I finally saved all my money and got the very bike I wanted right down to the brand and color. I loved that bike. I did this again when I decided to study abroad in Austria. I determined that I was going to go no matter the cost. Mind you, visualizing does not produce much if action doesn’t take place also. For me, I wrote a ton of essays for scholarships and grants, and ended up going for FREE. The visualizing made me believe it could happen, and it motivated me to act.

6) Scribing: Write something., anything…for ten minutes anyone can do this. Nothing more needs to be said on this topic. Everyone knows what it means.

After all of this, I read a book called Complaint Free World, and after implementing a “miracle morning” routine into my life, this became easier. I will talk about this another time.

How All This Got Started

I started a Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/Vegans-and-Raw-Foodies-172654636111420/ , back in 2010 because I had terrible back pain from an auto accident. I had tried everything to stop the pain, and finally found that way through eating healthier! I want to share this wonderful adventure in healthier foods with you!

So let us begin at the very beginning. One day, I got into a small fender-bender type of accident and it seemed as if no physical harm had taken place. But about six months later, I started to get tingling down my right arm, and my back started to hurt so bad that even breathing hurt something terrible. I didn’t know it at the time, but a chiropractor I started to go to told me that the tingling down my arm indicated that I was in an accident. My insurance company knew this also and covered all the costs of my chiropractic care under PIP(personal injury protection) insurance.

Back to the pain… The pain was so bad, that if I bent over wrong, I would be dysfunctional the rest of the day, I couldn’t do anything but lay on my back for comfort. No medicine that doctors gave me helped even in the slightest. Ibuprofen was the only thing that would slightly help. In other words, I was in pain constantly about 90% of the time, totally misery and terrible torment…”God, take my life and let it be over” type of pain. I knew something needed to change and quick!

Do you know those detox tea bags you see in the coffee and tea aisle of the grocery store? Well I would never buy those because detox seemed like a scary word to drink without knowing what it would actually do in my body. So that will lay the groundwork on how I felt about detox….absolutely nothing, no clue….just a apprehension and healthy distrust against the tea corporations. Well, to continue, one morning I pulled out my back like usual, and I was at my wits end, so decided to google the word “detox” to see what would come up. And what I saw about half way down the search page was a link to someone’s juice fasting blog. So I clicked it open, and this woman was doing a 21 day juice fast! Yes that’s right… only drinking juice she made with her juice machine every time she was hungry.

So I had nothing to lose really by trying it, I was in constant pain and nothing else I did worked, so right then and there, I was on a 10 day juice fast. I immediately got up and took out my juicer, about 3 apples and a bunch of carrots and made my first juice. I announced to my family that I was now on a juice fast and no one believed me that I was actually going to follow through, which made me more determined.

Through the next couple days, I started to add a lot of vegetables to my juice, so a normal juice go-to consisted of kale, cucumber, a green apple, celery, lemon, and ginger. I would make a watermelon, lime, and cucumber juice for a treat. The greens need a different kind of juicer to get all that healthy nutrition blood out of their leaves, so I ordered a new juicer. I would watch YouTube videos by people who did juice fasting and had a lot of experience and continued to learn more and more each day.

Everything was going well up until day four. On day four, I could not even think of getting out of bed. My head was killing me and my whole body was unhappy. My husband (at that time….now ex-husband) asked me if I would like some Ibuprofen to which I said no. I felt that this was part of the “detox” part of the juice fast. My ex-husband kindly made me some juice since he joined me on this journey of juice detox. I think what was going that day, was that my body was mad that I was not giving it all the processed food, coffee, and sugar it was used to, and it was telling me so. When people detox from their drug of choice, the body is eventually going to scream, and it is usually sooner than later. This is when most people quit. However, I was about to experience something I was hoping for, but was really skeptical of, even though I was giving it all a fair shake.

On day five of my juice fast, I woke up, and was wondering how I would feel. I laid there for a little while and noticed that I did not have a headache. So I let my feet hit the floor. Got out of bed and felt FANTASTIC! No pain so far, and I didn’t feel that I needed any coffee! I came out to the kitchen and proclaimed that I felt great and wasn’t in pain. Then I got dressed and went outside to start making a garden. Juice fasting can be quite expensive, so I planted kale, swiss chard, spinach and some other winter veggies and covered them up for winter.

I will write more about this over the next few days and post again, but I will tell you in advance that ALL my pain has never returned!