Making the Essensials of Your Pantry

I drink plant-based milk.  I’m not trying to be one of those people, but if you knew how cows are treated on industrial farms when they are milked, you would drink plant-based milk too.  I got a high-powered blender – a Vitamix – for Christmas.  Yes, I am a thirty-five year old who still asks for Christmas presents, deal with it.  It occurred to me, the most expensive of all plant-based milks is oat milk, but if you look at what oats actually cost, it’s a few pennies per ounce.  Isn’t oat milk just oats and water?

Yes, oat milk is just oats and water.  Soak a small amount of oats in water overnight.  Pour into blender and add more water.  Blend.  Strain.  Let cool.  The recipe is actually really simple, but I need a very fine strainer to filter out the oat solids.  I got nut-milk bags on Amazon (if you can think of it, someone has invented it).  They actually do not recommend you make oat milk with the bags, but you can make almond milk.  And yes, almond milk is just almonds and water.  The store bought stuff (both almond and oat) has added vitamins and minerals, but they also have added thickeners, and you don’t want that.  So I made almond milk, but store bought almonds are pretty expensive, right?  Well actually, it only takes a few almonds to make a full pitcher, and my local grocery store raised the price of the store brand almond milk from $3.99 to $4.49 for three-quarters of a gallon.  It’s worth noting, you need unroasted, unsalted almonds.

Homemade almond milk, next to homemade jelly

So that’s a big win.  Homemade almond milk is cheaper, tastes better, and you can say you made it.  This got me thinking, what else can I make in the blender?  My dad has given me two little glass bottles of hot sauce that his co-worker’s son has made.  Could I make my own hot sauce in the blender?  Yes…  it’s not hard.  I got a massive discount on produce at a grocery store near me, so it’s hard to say if it will always be cheaper, but I spent less than three dollars on ingredients and got a large quantity of hot sauce from the recipe.  Another win.

Just throw everything for hot sauce into the blender and turn it on.

Finally, I made some homemade jelly.  This was actually the hardest recipe of the three.  You crush the grapes, add water, and heat the concoction over the stove.  Then you filter out the solids, and you get diluted grape juice.  Put that in the fridge overnight.  The next day, add a ton of sugar, and pectin after that. Pectin is the secret ingredient that makes jelly, jelly.  Pectin comes from fruit, and is a good source of fiber.  Put the juice, sugar, and pectin mix on the stove for a while, then store it in a glass airtight container in the fridge.  I actually don’t have these, so I let the recipe cool and used plastic.  The airtight container prevents mold, but most jelly recipes say you can freeze the jelly, and I imagine that helps prevent mold too.  Once again, the recipe makes a lot of food, so I gave half the jelly to my dad.  I learned the hard way you can use grape juice instead of crushed grapes.  Next time.

Take that, Welch’s!  Take that, Tabasco!  Fun fact, the first blog post I ever made on blimpsgo180.com was a food post.  It’s still there.  I’m having fun in the kitchen.  Some other things I’m making are rice and beans, Briam (a Greek dish), potatoes and onions, and sweet potatoes.  It’s keeping me off the streets.  I am playing a game right now, but playing a game takes me about two weeks, and I learn about a half dozen other cool games during that time, so at this rate, I will never stop playing video games.