Raw, Non-Dairy Hot Chocolate (has an awesome bonus result)

While cruising around for a recipe for a raw, apple-pie smoothie today (how many other people use Google as their main cookbook? :), I stumbled upon Karen Knowler's blog, and after checking out her (okay, actually Nina Dench's) recipe for it, I browsed her homepage and found her recipe for Spiced Hot Chocolate. So, as a snack for the family today, I tried it out.

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Real Hot Chocolate *not instant!

Recently, Lifehacker had a post about how to make a better-tasting instant hot chocolate mix, linking off to Cook's Country that revealed the recipe as including dry milk powder, confectioner's sugar, salt, white chocolate chips, and Dutch-processed cocoa powder.

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Milk Recall Affects Five States (but does it matter?)

Image via WikipediaAn upper-Northeastern dairy has voluntarily recalled 8,000 to 10,000 gallons of milk after it was discovered that a pasteurization machine failure. While it's very admirable that the dairy announced this massive recall in a precautionary measure, recalls like this - let alone the recalls such as the recent egg fiasco or other meat-related incidents that left people ill or dead - should be scaring people far, far away from the idea of purchasing food created in "factory" farms.

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Hurom Slow Juicer, a few weeks in and loving it

We have several juicers - four, to be exact - in our house, now. The first three that we owned were all centrifugal juicers. I've got one at work so that I can juice there as I feel, we've got an old one as a gift, from a garage sale, that we never really used, and we had our prior best one in the kitchen for nigh-daily use. It was a rather nice centrifugal one that we also received as a gift, but it had a tendency to leak. We never really figured out what caused it to leak but enough was finally enough.
Please read the follow-up review.

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The Many Milks

Image via Wikipedia

Once in a while I break down and actually get a latte at a local coffee shop, Cafe Patteen, and the conversation with the owner (I'm usually drawn to places where the owner actually works) often comes around to talking about milk due to the rather strange way I order.  IF I order a latter, it's always a decaf latte, extra hot, made from 50% half-and-half, and 50% water.  You may ask, "why not just order 2% milk, in that case?" But there are reasons to my insanity. Sometimes.

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Raw Milk in Minneapolis

Image via Wikipedia

Update, June 2010: Kalisch Farms is not an option for buying raw milk products.

Just a quick review of the Kalisch family farm, a Minneapolis-based CSA where you can get raw, organic milk products, eggs, vegetables (in season), meat, and more. My brother found this farm somewhere, but I have found their link on the Raw Milk Locator page on RealMilk.com as well.

My first reaction, which was as of this writing a few months ago, to finding the website was to scour their site for offered products, read about their farm and user reviews, and to check out the pictures of happy cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, goats, and other animals in their "Pictures from the Farm" album.

If sometime I get the chance, I'd love to take this fact-finding a bit further and actually go visit the farm, to see it in person, as I believe that to be an important part of the Psychic Lunch idea: knowing what you eat. Until then, the photos and other users opinions were enough for me to try them out, and I'm glad I did.

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Today Ice Cream is More than Just Frozen, Sweet Cream!

Image via Wikipedia

The subject of ice cream came up recently in a conversation and as I also have a sweet spot for the stuff, I thought I'd put my response out here for more to share.

Ice cream should be an occasional treat and we can probably all start in agreement on that point. It's typical high in calories considering the concept of it is frozen, sweetened cream. In America it's probably eaten more often than it should. Working in a downtown area, it is unsurprising to see people eating as they walk down the skyways at any particular time of the year. So what exactly are we eating when we devour this evilly-delicious stuff?

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Raw milk makes sense

There was much discussion about raw milk at the recent Weston A Price Foundation conference held near Chicago, Illinois. As this writer was not able to witness all of the lectures personally, this will be a layman's perspective on why raw milk is the better, healthier choice over pasteurized milk. This will be, essentially, a question of common sense and of history.

It is probably ingrained within each of us not only to strive for personal and cultural betterment, but also the assumption of it as well. This is a grave mistake that is nearly always overlooked until it is too late, whereupon something catastrophic occurs to remind us of our humanity. We as humans simply assume that progress is good in and of itself, and that assumption could not have been more wrong than in the application of pasteurization to the process of milk production.

Before pasteurization, all milk was raw or fermented. People have consumed milk since Biblical times or earlier. It is plain, common sense that had raw milk actually ever been as dangerous as we typically assume now, we would not be alive today. But it wasn't and isn't dangerous - not until mankind decided, due to rising urban pressures and industrialization, to try to streamline the process. The poor sanitary conditions of the cows and workers used in this streamlining process only contributed to the deaths of many people - especially infants over the coming years of industrialization. The only solution, then, for massive dairies to provide milk free from contamination was to pasteurize it, thus killing all the good parts along with the bad.

Around the time of World War II there arose a media-driven attack on local, farm-raised milk. Who knows? Perhaps the owners of such magazines as Ladies Home Journal, The Progressive, or Reader's Digest were friends with major mainstream dairy producers and were, God forbid, financially motivated to denounce opposition to their producer friends. However it happened, the smear campaign against milk successfully frightened the people into believing that "raw milk can kill you".  Suddenly, thousands upon thousands of years of history were forgotten with the wave of a dollar.

Decades passed then, with the proponents of industrial dairies having apparently "won" the battle of the cow. But truth never goes away and is always remembered and practiced by a very few. Today, thanks to unavoidable news such as E.Coli infected, mass-produced beef, or the more recent swine flu, the public slowly begins to awaken, sleepy-eyed and stretching, to the abominable state of industrial agriculture. People are beginning to talk to their neighbors who raise cattle and drink their raw milk - and learning that nothing harmful is happening to them! Isn't it amazing? Then those people get online and share it with more friends, and the word spreads.

The cow is considered wealth in many countries, and has been considered wealth in almost all countries in the past. People are finally realizing once again that milk is life, and doesn't need to be pasteurized killed.

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Resources:

• http://www.raw-milk-facts.com/milk_history.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk#History
• http://greenlivingjournal.com/page.php?p=1025
• http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/business/global/17iht-rbofmilk.html

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