Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Summer Haze, Garden Days: What I've been up to in my garden this summer!

One of my favorite pastimes is spending time gardening. I have quite a large garden in the back of my house, and an even larger piece of property that I can wild forage upon. I simply love this, and on many given days you can find me out in the back tending to my plants, and running around examining and harvesting wildflowers. There is really nothing that you can buy in the grocery store that could ever compare to what you can grow at home. Further more, seeing all the different species of plants pop up at different times creates a much more profound understanding and appreciation of mother earth and what she provides us. For example, when spring first rolls around, we get a lot of detoxifying plants popping up like dandelion leaf, but by the end of the summer and into the fall we start getting things like squash, which are sweet, heavy and nourishing and prepare us for the winter months of cold and snow. So here is a little play-by-play of my garden, (mostly chronologically)

Monday, August 4, 2014

Homemade Oat Milk

       Hey there everyone! So today I want to share something that I have been really getting into recently, non-dairy milk alternatives! While I am a locto-ovo vegetarian and I do eat dairy, I have been making much more of a concerted effort to cut down on unnecessary dairy such as milk. Don't get me wrong, I do love my cheese, eggs, and milk, but if you are going to eat them it is so super important to get them from ethical, local sources. Lately this has been weighing on my mind more, so I've been either picking up milk at the farmer's market from local dairy farmers, or buying milk alternatives when I can't make it down to the farmer's market.
      I've experimented with store bought non-dairy milks, (and sadly I can't drink almond milk due to my boyfriend's allergies) and have come across a few that I really appreciate. My top 3 have become coconut milk, hemp milk, and oat milk. I'm more than happy drinking a ton of this stuff whenever I want it, but there is just one major issue when push comes to shove: the cost. For example, at my local grocer a small 32 oz container of hemp milk is a whopping $3.99! That is nuts (no pun intended)! So today when I ran out of my beloved hemp milk and my grocery budget was running low, I decided to give homemade oat milk a try, as I had a big canister of oats on my kitchen shelf. The results were wonderful and it probably cost my no more than 50 cents to make 32 ounces, ridiculous in comparison to that $3.99 I was paying for the same amount of store-bought. Oat milk tastes kind of like...well liquid oats I suppose. If you can imagine a liquid incarnation of oatmeal, it would be oat milk. Definitely give this one a try if you're into DIY dairy alternatives :)