Hi I’m Glen Colello, Holistic Health Counselor and raw food chef. I’m here to share with you how I overcame acne that lasted into my late twenties, allergies that made it very difficult for me to breathe and back pain that plagued a collegiate athletic career.
For the back pain, I began seeing a chiropractor, and the chiropractor continually spoke to me about my nutritional habits. And in doing so, he asked me to make some changes, and finally I did do that. And in doing so, the first change I made was to give up dairy. And in giving up dairy I started to feel great - even for just 2 weeks. My allergies started to subside, my acne started to fade, and my back pain started to feel much better.
At the time I was working at a Boys & Girls Club as the Director of Program Development in contact with hundreds of kids every single day. The kids started to ask - they started to feel my energy change - and they started to ask what are you doing differently. I would begin to have conversations with them about what is was: my dietary changes. And those dietary changes of sugar and dairy and meat leaving my diet began an interesting discussion between myself and the kids.
And in creating healthy habits one of my first focuses is a dairy replacement. That dairy replacement is almond milk. Kids absolutely love the taste of almond milk. Parents find it extremely easy to make. And the combination of taste great and easy to make is just awesome! Today we are going to be making almond milk.
Here we go. Almond milk: a tasty, nutritious replacement for dairy products. So we’re going to start off very simply by adding water to the Vita-Mix; the high powered 2 horsepower Vita-Mix. So we have 4 cups of good quality water. Second step: raw almonds. These almonds we have previously soaked - we’ve soaked them in water overnight - about 8 hours. Why soak nuts? The reason you’re going to soak your almonds, your cashews, your walnuts, your pecans, any nuts you use for this recipe is that you’re going to release the digestive inhibitors and make it better to digest. So we’re going to add 2 cups of almonds to the Vita-Mix. And remember, always, always, always put the top on the Vita-Mix. It’s a good habit to start.
So from here we’re going to turn our Vita-Mix on. I’m going to turn it to high very quickly. It’ll be about 10 seconds worth of blending, and then we’ll be ready to go.
And that’s it. There are people out there that’ll choose to consume the almond milk that we just made as is. And that can be used in smoothies, as almond milk or in any of your recipes that call for milk.
For kids and for taste, we’re going to pour the almond milk into this nut milk bag. We’re going to pour the almond milk slowly into the bag, and this is where you want to include your children to help you out with this as well and get them a part of the making of the food process. We’re going to pour the almond milk into this nut milk bag. All blender full of almond milk will go into this bag. And then our next step (we replace the blender for its future use); next and absolutely "funest" step - kids love to do this - we just grab the bag tight and go ahead and squeeze the bag. What happens is the nut meat stays in the bag and all the tasty, nutritious almond milk will come out of the bag into our bowl.
So once we’re done squeezing, we’ll place the nut meat aside. That nut meat can play a big role in many other recipes. What we have left in the [bowl] for all of you to view is nut milk: almond nut milk.
Again, people may choose to consume the nut milk as is; very, very nutritious in this situation. But what we will do to cater to the kids and add some sweetness, we’ll add the nut milk back into the blender. And then we’ll add some simple ingredients. And those simple ingredients - again all optional - we start with vanilla extract. A nice tasty ingredient. We’re just going to add a capful: a capful of vanilla extract.
Then agave nectar. Raw agave nectar is a low glycemic sweetener. It’s really, really tasty and kids absolutely love it. Kids are used to having sweet foods, and this is a very good sweetener that again is low glycemic and actually health promoting. So we’re going to add a quarter cup of agave nectar to our blender.
And the last and final ingredient is sea salt. Now notice I said sea salt and not just salt. White salt that you get at most supermarkets creates health challenges. Sea salt should be gray, and most good sea salts are gray and that’ll signify that the minerals are still in the sea salt itself. You can also get pink salt. Pink Himalayan rock salt is also a good salt to add to this recipe. So we’ll go ahead and we’ll take 2 very small scoops of sea salt, and we’ll add that to our milk.
And that is it for ingredients. Can you imagine how easy that is? We’ll go ahead and put the top back on our blender and we’ll re-blend. And all these good ingredients are being re-blend into this milk.
Voila, we’re done! We have tasty, nutritious, amazing almond milk. And almond milk will be enjoyed by all that taste. We’re going to pour some into the cup, and I’m going to have a taste. Wow, this is awesome. I wish I discovered almond milk when I was a kid.