My wife and I go to great efforts to provide our kids with the best nutrition we can while at the same time maintaining sanity in the house (and also a budget – so organic chicken and beef is definitely out). My wife breast-feeds the kids fully for at least half a year and after that (when she goes back to work) they drink expressed milk and complete the diet by eating whole rice, oat, kinoa and other types porridge. When our first child was born, we also started to supplement the breast-milk (when it became scarce after a year give or take) with rice milk, adding kinoa, oats, and almonds, making it a very rich and nutritious food. In those days I had lots of time, so I make the milk by cooking it for many hours on low fire, then passing it through a cheesecloth. Oh, I really had a lot of time. With the birth of our second child we bought a soya-milk making machine and made our rice-milk with it, but it was pretty hard to clean and also required some work.
So now that I have 4 children, I really don’t have much time… but on the other side, I still want to give them home-made rice-milk to eat with their morning cereals (granola), instead of drinking cow milk (a known mucus creating agent) or rice-milk sold in stores (expensive). So I devised this very easy rice-milk recipe, which takes no time, all cooking elements can be washed in the machine-washer and gives you the best of both a sane an healthy world.
Rice Milk
Ingredients (for 1.5 liter of rice milk. Take into account that the milk goes sour after 5-6 days):
- 1/4 cup whole-grain, organic round rice (the best taste. Basmati tastes horrible).
- 1.5 liters filtered or mineral whater
- A good blender
- A medium size strainer
- A container for the milk
- Heavy-bottom pot with good closing lid
Instructions
- On a heavy-bottom pot that has a good closing lid
pour in 1/4 cup of whole-organic-round rice
and 1.5 cups of water.
- Bring to a boil.
- Transfer the pot to a low heat cooker
(preferably use also a heat diffuser on top of the cooker)
and cover with a lid.
- Cook for 3-4 hours, stirring once in a while to prevent the rice from sticking to the bottom of the pot. Pour more water into the pot if the rice has absorbed all of the water. You should stop cooking when you add more water and the rice doesn’t manage to absorb it.
- Using your standard blender
pour the rice porridge into the blender
add water up to the top of the blender’s jar
and blend for a couple of minutes.
- Pass the contents of the blender through the strainer.
- And finally, pour the filtered milk into the final container.
That’s it!. You can now enjoy your freshly cooked rice milk.
For extra taste (that children like), you can some sugar (brown, of course) to the final mix or to the blender. For more nutritional value you can add kinoa, oats and almonds. Just take into account that kinoa gives the mix a very strong taste that kids may not like.
Enjoy