Ah, for the love of almonds....

I've been doing a lot with almonds lately, in an effort to give my 8 year old some different food options that do not involve grains.

It turns out that after tightening up his diet...taking out wheat, sugar, preservatives and most grains, he has turned into an angel once again at school. 

Remember I was complaining about his turdyness? Well, his teacher says he's calmed down a lot and is behaving beautifully. Now, it's not like he used to eat a lot of junk, but the wheat had crept back in to a certain extent and with a certain wheat product was preservative 282. 

Hmmmmm. No real mystery is it?

All of which meant I was scrambling to find school lunch solutions that he would be happy to eat in front of his friends. One of the things I came up was a 'milkshake'. This has raw, organic, full cream milk, avocado, a pastured egg yolk, cocoa powder, a couple of dates, a baby spinach leaf or two and a small amount of rapadura. I whiz it up in my thermomix, pour it into a shaker with a leak proof lid and it goes in his insulated lunch box with a freezy pack and a straw.

I'd give him this every couple of days or so and then my preppy started wanting one too. No problem, just we started going through a lot of milk and it's not cheap. Almonds again to the rescue, I tried making some almond milk. Very easy to make, and lovely and creamy. I wrote up how I make it, with pictures, if you want instructions.

How to make almond milk.

(Yes, clearly I cannot pour straight...)

Actually, if you look at the messy kitchen picture in my previous post, you can see jars of almonds lined up on the windowsill. I also have been using the almonds to make grain free brownies, grain free banana bread, almond butter and grain free cereal. We are lucky enough in Australia to be able to get raw almonds, and you can probably source truly raw almonds in many other countries too, but not in the U.S.

In America all almonds are pasteurized but growers/manufacturers are still allowed to label them as raw.

But the only way to get REAL raw almonds in the U.S. is to buy an imported brand.   

Ok, enough rambling. If I don't post again soonish, you'll know my house has been taken over by almonds. 

Or more likely, the school hols are kicking my butt......