Maple Mate Latte

This is my favorite thing ever. It is the perfect afternoon treat. In fact, I am enjoying one right now.

Ingredients:

1 mug full of brewed mate

1/2 to 1 cup almond milk (store-bought or home-made)

2 teaspoons to 2 tablespoons maple syrup (depending on how sweet you like it and how sweet your almond milk is already)

Brew your mate. Add milk and maple syrup. Be happy and energized and grateful.

It is good hot, cold, room temperature. It also makes you want to dance. So if you are going to make a maple mate latte on a limited time schedule, pencil in some dancing time. Also, it tastes the best when you are sitting outside in the sunshine listening to the birds chirping with your eyes closed.

Nut Milk Magic

Since I stopped drinking milk years ago, I have always bought soy milk and almond milk from the grocery store to use as a milk replacement. Not anymore! I recently learned how to make my own nut milks at home. Well, I guess I have read about making them myself for a while, but I finally decided to try it out not too long ago. And now I am obsessed with it! It is really easy and inexpensive and you don't need anything super special - just a blender and a "nut milk bag." What is a nut milk bag, you may wonder? It is nothing other than a paint strainer bag that you can get from the hardware store for about $1. Beautiful.

Also, you can use any RAW nuts or seeds that you want. My favorites are almonds, hazelnuts, sesame seeds, and pumpkin seeds. But you could also use cashews, sunflower seeds, brazil nuts, hemp seeds, etc. You can buy nuts/seeds pretty inexpensively from the bulk bins at grocery stores and natural foods stores. Trader Joe's also has really great prices on raw nuts/seeds.

I have read a bunch of recipes and used trial and error to figure out what works for me, so here it goes.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup nuts/seeds

3-4 cups water (depending on how rich you want it to be)

3-5 dates or a few teaspoons of agave syrup or a pinch of stevia (optional)

Add your nuts and water to the blender. Then add your sweetener if desired. Blend until nuts stop rattling. Strain liquid through a nut milk bag. Store in a recycled glass jar in the fridge. Use within 5 days or so.

See? It takes 5 minutes and it is wonderfully amazing. It is so delicious that you can drink it plain, top cereal with it, make chocolate milk, use it as the base for smoothies, put it in tea/coffee, make a maple mate latte. ANYTHING!

Wendell Berry is kind of my hero

"Why should rest and food and ecological health not be the basic principles of our art and science of healing? Is it because the basic principles already are technology and drugs? Are we confronting some fundamental incompatibility between mechanical efficiency and organic health? I don't know. I only know that sleeping in a hospital is like sleeping in a factory and that the medical industry makes only the most tenuous connection between health and food and no connection between health and the soil. Industrial medicine is as little interested in ecological health as is industrial agriculture."

- Wendell Berry, from an essay called "Health is Membership"