Eating Vegan with Crohn's Disease

If you have any nuts at home, it is literally easier to make nut milk than to figure out how to get it from the store during the pandemic.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup of nuts, really any kind, preferably not salted
• water
• salt, optional
• 1-2 dates for extra dank flavor, optional

Tools:

• a blender
• an old t-shirt, pillowcase, clean kitchen towel to strain the milk thru
• Some container (mixing bowl, large measuring cup, or the container below) to strain the nut milk into after you pour it out of the blender
• a container to keep your milk in the fridge

Instructions:

1. The day before you are out of milk, put one cup of nuts in 2 cups of water to soak. If you don’t do this ahead of time it doesn’t actually matter, but soaking makes processing the nuts into milk easier.
2. Drain the water off of your soaked nuts and rinse them.
3. Put the nuts in a blender. I use a regular ass blender. Nothing special.
4. Add 4 cups of water to the blender, pinch of salt, 1-2 dates.
5. Blend on high for 5 minutes or as long as you can handle to listen to a blender on high.
6. You are now going to strain out the nut chunks.
   *Take whatever cloth strainer you found and position it over the top of your mixing bowl or measuring cup or what have you.
   *Lining the inside of a colander or mesh strainer with your cloth can help with this.
   *I use a little pouch made of jersey knit cloth that some pillowcases I bought came in. It has a drawstring on the top, and I can tighten the drawstring around the lip of the container I pour the stuff into.
7. Pour the nut milk into your straining contraption. Let it drain, then squeeze out the remaining milk.
8. You’re done! Keep your fresh homemade nut milk in the fridge up to a week. Maybe more. IDK smell it or see if it tastes weird. 4 cups of nut milk gets me through a week of coffee and oatmeal so it works out just fine.

A container of nut milk that only has nuts and water in it will cost, minimum, $5 from any store. A pound of nuts costs between $7-12. Do some home econ math in your head on that one.

The major, most available brands of nut milk contain lots of other ingredients, including emulsifiers and preservatives. This recipe is pretty bare bones and I know I can digest everything in it without complication.