No milk thank you
Earlier in the year, I wrote about my 12 Things for 2019. This was a list of goals to achieve in the course of the year. In some cases I cannot tick them off until the end of the year, because the “thing” lasted all year long. Those ones are going well – no failures yet. Others are checked as soon as they are done and quite a few have been completed. This month I am working on #5 …
I am having a month without consuming any dairy products. In practical terms, this means that I am eliminating: milk, cheese, yogurt and chocolate.
Milk is not too much of a problem. I very rarely drink milk. I take tea black anyway. So it is only really milk in coffee and on my breakfast cereal that I needed to think about. There are numerous non-dairy “milk” products available: soya, rice, oat, coconut, almond and hazelnut; I imagine that there are others too. I have found oat milk quite acceptable. When having coffee in a chain coffee shop recently, I thought that I would try coconut milk and that was very good. By an odd coincidence, this particular chain are not charging any extra for special milks for a limited time.
Yogurt is a little frustrating. I can get products made from soya or almond milk and the latter has quite a good taste. The are expensive – maybe 4X the price of regular yogurt. My main beef is that they are runny and I like greek style thick yogurt and I cannot find a suitable product.
Cheese is the hardest. I am told that vegan cheese can be OK, but I am rather unconvinced. As I am a cheese freak, this is the hardest thing from which to abstain. I guess that I will make up for it in December – there is a cheese advent calendar in the fridge!
After cheese, my other big passion is chocolate. The good news here is that, although there is very little choice, I can get bars of ordinary “milk” chocolate that contain no dairy and taste OK. I have been buying these 6 at a time. It was tough last week, when I was visiting Sweden and getting a large quantity of a favorite chocolate that I just put in the cupboard when I got home.
Looking at the calendar: I am almost half way there …
