Your Mom's A Vegan: Vegan MoFo, Day 8: Tasty Drinks--Week 2

Happy Monday! Let's start this week with a couple of yummy drink recipes!

First up, a lovely breakfast drink:

Almond Barley Tea
adapted from Meatless Meals, page 43
serves about 6 tea cups--supplies phosphorus, starch, protein, and sugar

1/2 cup raw almonds
1/2 cup pearl barley
2 Tbsp sugar
squeeze of lemon juice

Put almonds into a plastic bag and pound them until fine (alternatively, you can use a food processor, high-speed blender, or mortar & pestle, but this was a good way for me to wake up!). Wash barley. In a saucepan, combine almonds, barley, sugar, and about 6 cups of water and boil until barley is tender. Strain liquid into a bowl or pitcher (use a small mesh strainer). Squeeze lemon into liquid. Best when served hot.

I was going to throw out the cooked barley-almond mixture, but then I decided to taste it, and now it's serving as my breakfast all week! Yay! (Pretty delicious, if I do say so.)

{delicate and creamy}

{you could definitely add cinnamon to this recipe}

Next up, a delicious and refreshing drink for any time!

Apple-Orangeade

modified from Meatless Meals, page 44

serves 8 small glasses

3 honeycrisp apples

1 orange

1 Tbsp sugar

Wash apples and orange. Peel orange (I had oranges left over from the Candied Orange Peels, so I thought it would taste delicious with orange as well). Chop apples, throw away seeds and core. Boil 10 cups of water. In a pitcher, add the orange and mash it with a potato masher or a spoon. Add the apples to the pitcher. Pour the boiling water over the apples and orange, stir, and cover for about 25 minutes until it has cooled. Strain out fruit over a bowl to catch the liquid. Pour back into the pitcher and stir in sugar. Serve over ice.

You could keep the apples for something else. They're pretty tasty as-is, though! Mrs. Adams says that you could actually make this out of a whole range of dried and fresh fruit.