Curious Souls

About  one year ago , we moved into our new home in Fort Collins, CO. What has changed since then? Many things! (Details forthcoming.) One of the most visible changes being that the owners painted our house "Forest Service Green" a month ago. Fancy! And, we went from a high of 77 yesterday, to three inches of snow (and still accumulating) tonight! Crazy Colorado weather... Asher loves it! Time to break out the snow boots!

The soy milk experiment was a success!! From 577 grams of soy beans ($2 worth), I made ONE GALLON of delicious milk! Here's what happened today: Turning the beans into a foamy paste: Moderately Easy I drained the soaking beans and put them in the processor with some water. What made this slightly harder than totally easy is that 1) I have a four cup food processor so I had to do it in lots of batches and 2) I didn't process the first couple of batches long enough so I had to repeat the processing. The goal with this is to make it thick and foamy. Boiling the soy bean mixture: Easy But Incredibly Messy I added the thick foamy mixture to some pre-heated water. Even after splitting it into four different pots, it still tried to overflow. Separating the Soy Milk from the Okara: Easy but HOT After 20 minutes, it was time to separate the soy milk from the fibrous bean part, called okara. This is done by pouring the whole mixture into a cotton muslin bag and then squeezi...

Jon and I have been eating more vegan than not lately which means more soy milk and tofu. After a conversation with some friends of mine and the discovery of this site , I decided that I wanted to try to make my own soy milk and tofu. This is a many day process so I'm going to blog about it as I go, which means you will get my totally uncensored opinion of how hard or easy it is. Today involved the purchase of the soy beans and the soaking. Buying organic soy beans: Easy I found organic soy beans at the Fort Collins Food Co-op . If you live in a town with a food co-op, you should definitely check it out. We buy all of our bulk items at the coop and recently had to shop at a Whole Foods when we were out of town and wow  is the Whole Foods bulk section ridiculously small (Take that, Whole Foods! Your bulk food section is miniscule !) Anyway, here are the soy beans in all their organic and inexpensive glory: You will notice in the instructions that the recipe calls for o...