This month we are starting an elimination diet. The first of the food products to test will be milk. This means no cows milk for this month. At the end of the month we’re to introduce milk to see what reactions our daughter has. This will help discover what allergies are causing her runny eyes and nose.

Thanks to quirky cooking’s blog we have made our first batch of rice-almond milk. It is dairy free, creamy and delicious to drink on it’s own. We are enjoying drinking it in our coffee, with cereal and as a replacement in baking.

Creating our own milk is a great way to help educate our kids. Our daughter loves learning the how and why behind things. She loved helping make dairy free milk from raw ingredients – brown rice, almonds, coconut oil,  rice malt syrup and water. I worked out the cost to be around $1 a litre (the same as buying cows milk from the supermarket). We bought bulk ingredients to cover the month so we can make 2 litres of milk at a time when needed.

The process is so simple and the most amount of time taken is waiting for it to cool before straining the milk. After grinding the rice and almonds to flour, coconut oil, rice malt syrup and water is added and cooked for 6 minutes. Once the milk has cooled to room temperature it can be strained in a nut bag.

I had heard about nut milk bags but hadn’t seen them until we visited the Paleo Cafe and saw them available for sale. The nut milk bag is fantastic – strong, easy to use and can be rinse and used again. Once all the milk has been squeezed out of the nut milk bag (about 1 litre), another 1 litre of water is added to create 2 litres of rice-almond milk. The pulp can be used in recipes or made into flour.

Debs.