Organic Day

What a wonderful, productive day off! As usual, I woke up at 7 AM wired, so I made a great smoothie with oranges, ginger, spinach, celery, carrots and hemp protein powder to enjoy while I caught up with my blog reading.

I had to create another batch of almond milk and got to use another new stevia product with it.

I typically use 2-3 pitted dates and vanilla to sweeten my almond milk, but decided to try NuNaturals Pure Liquid Vanilla Alcohol Free Stevia this time. 5 drops is a serving, but not sure how sweet it would be, I added 15 drops to a 4 cup almond milk batch. It actually made the milk just sweet enough while adding a nice vanilla flavor, not too strong and great to drink on it’s own or in coffee. Next batch I’ll try 20 drops, but this is a great product for sweetening almond milk. The little 2 oz. bottle has 240 5-drop servings in it, so it will last for a lot of almond milk batches. Plus I’m looking forward to trying it with chia seed pudding.

My chihuahua loves almond milk making time, she hangs around my feet hoping I’ll drop a chunk of almond pulp for her to inhale. She loves just about every nut, avocados and even zucchini, maybe I’m converting her to raw too! Seriously, I wonder if I could use almond pulp to create vegan dog food and only give her meat a couple times a week … hmmmm.

We ventured north to an organic plant nursery in Grass Valley to load our new organic garden boxes hubby just completed with locally grown organic starters.

I read about this nursery in the paper a couple of months ago and have been itching to check it out since and my amazing hubby planted our super finds as soon as we got home. I now have an organic garden box stuffed with kale, spinach, tomatoes, cilantro, basil, fennel, peas, chard, green onions, chocolate mint and hot peppers! I even got a dwarf almond tree planted and seeds for organic carrots and beets to sprout all for much cheaper than I thought compared local places here, totally worth the drive! I’m so excited, I love having a garden, there is something very relaxing about coming home after a stressful day at work to browse and tend to a garden – at least to me, guess I’m just weird like that. :-) He designed the garden beds using methods from All New Square Foot Gardening and will be adding vine grids this weekend for the crops to grow up.