Almond Milk and Fish, yo

It's summertime which means that in addition to being bored and useless til I go to France in a few weeks, I have to take on the responsibility of finding and making healthy meals for myself since I no longer have the caf at my disposal.

My summertime quest for healthy food/meals sort of started off (of all things) with a tweet about hemp milk by Edward Norton. I had never heard of hemp milk before so I looked it up and found a site that explained different alternatives to milk which include soy, rice, hemp, oat, and almond. Soy milk is really good, so I wanted to try what else was out there. So I chose almond milk, and tried it. And boy is it hard to drink. I don't consider myself a picky eater, but after a few seconds, I was so repulsed I was ready to spit all the milk out. I'm not sure quite how to describe the taste other than it's like an almond army attacking your taste-buds. The flavor is so intense it almost feels like you'll never be able to even think about eating an individual almond again. Diluting the milk with water didn't help to quell the unpleasantness much either. After taking only a few sips I sat there looking at the fairly large container and thinking what a pity it was that it was probably going to go to waste. The fact that I was going to be throwing away something so ridiculously low fat and healthy --it's 50 calories a cup and brimming with vitamins like B12, D, & E, was pretty disappointing. However the story does not end here...

Lo and behold my perennial favorite for just about everything under the sun, The New York Times, has a section called Recipes for Health with relatively simple recipes that tah-dah are healthy for you! :) There was a recipe for a Banana Smoothie highlighted on the site that I happened to click on because the picture caught my attention. In the recipe you can substitute some of the ingredients like peanut butter for almond butter or skim milk for almond milk. Then I got excited that maybe bulbous carton of almond milk wouldn't go to waste afterall! I made the recipe, improvising a bit, here's the link to it and really liked the results! So everything worked out in the end.



Another thing...
During the last week in school I had a really good grilled salmon salad in the caf and became more interested in eating fish. The thing with fish is that despite being incredibly healthy to eat comes with all this baggage about mercury levels, extinction, and controversy about farms that grow them. Most health experts (or whoever it is that dictates to the general populace what's good for us and what isn't) urge people to eat more fish particularly because they're high in protein and low in fat. Yet, so many species are over-harvested or raised on the aforementioned fish farms that grow them in an unhealthy and cruel way, that navigating the waters of buying fish can be a bit confusing. The Environmental Defense Fund has a great tool up that can help you find which fish to buy and eat. Find it here:

I hope my Democratization of the Environment professor is proud of me that I actually am taking what I learned and applying into to my life and spreading the news to others. ;)