Got milk? You don’t have to just drink it. 

Love it or hate it, milk has a place not only in your diet but also in your tool box and cleaning closet as well as among your toiletries. Raw goat milk, in its unadulterated and probiotic-heavy state, is the best to use. But seeing that unpasteurized milk is outlawed for sale almost everywhere in the U.S., pasteurized goat milk is second best. While not all milks are created equally, you can use any animal milk to successfully benefit from these tips. From curing a hangover to tending to those stained linens, milk has got your back.

Appetite Suppressant

To prevent overeating at mealtime, drink a glass of milk 15 minutes beforehand. Milk fills you up and gives you enough protein – 1 cup of non-fat milk contains 8.26 grams of protein – to keep you feeling fuller and less inclined to go overboard when food is served.

Hair Conditioner and Mask

With its vitamin and mineral content, milk works great on smoothing and shining your hair. Rinse your hair with fresh milk and let it sit wet for a few minutes before rinsing with water. You could also mix powdered milk with water to form a paste and then comb through hair, letting it to sit for at least 5 minutes before washing out.

Hangover Cure

Milk helps to settle the stomach, rehydrate the system, and raise blood sugar levels. These make it a great morning-after hangover cure. Additionally, milk contains the amino acid cysteine, which is known to neutralize a lethal dose of acetaldehyde, which is an alcohol metabolite.

Fish Freshener

Place frozen fish in a milk bath and let sit until the fish thaws. The milk makes the fish taste fresher.

Make-Up Remover

Mix powdered milk with water until a paste forms. Apply the paste to skin to remove make up. Rinse thoroughly.

Crack Eliminator

Before you toss Grandma’s beloved china, enlist milk to the rescue! The protein in milk reacts with the mineral kaolin in china to close cracks. All you have to do is place china in a pan, cover it with milk, and bring the mixture to a boil. Once boiling, reduce the heat to a simmer for up to an hour.

Silverware Polisher

For glistening silverware, take advantage of milk gone sour. Simply soak silverware in sour milk, cover it completely, and let it soak over night. The next day, wash the silverware as you normally would. If the milk isn’t sour already and you want to make your own, for every cup of milk, mix in one tablespoon of lemon juice and one tablespoon of vinegar and let it sit for five minutes before use.

Bug Bite Soother

Mix milk powder with enough water until it resembles a paste. Apply the paste to the area affected by the insect bite to relieve pain. The enzymes in the milk will neutralize the venom.

Facial Cleanser and Mask

Milk is a natural cleanser. It contains vitamin A, riboflavin, niacin, and vitamins B6 and B12. The alpha-hydroxy acids in milk exfoliate the skin, reducing the appearance of wrinkles and discoloration. Use a cotton ball to dab milk all across your face. Let it sit for a few minutes and then wash with water before moisturizing. For a mask, take 1/4 cup powdered milk and add enough water until it becomes a paste. Mix thoroughly and apply to the face. Allow to sit for 5 minutes before rinsing.

Ink Remover

To remove ink from clothing, take the affected garment and soak it in a milk bath overnight. The next day, wash the garment as usual. The stain should be gone. To boost the milk’s effectiveness, mix two parts milk with one part vinegar as the soaking solution.

Body Skin Moisturizer

The butterfat in milk moisturizes the skin. And because the pH of milk is close to the skin’s natural pH, the skin is more receptive to the moisturizing effects of the milk. Pour a few cups of fresh milk or 1/2 cup powdered milk into your bathtub, Cleopatra style.

Dry Hands Softener

To relieve dry and chafed hands, rinse them in milk a few times a day. Over the course of a week or two, your hands will begin to feel softer and less Winter rough.

Leather Cleaner

Dab worn or dirty leather with milk and buff until clean. The milk removes debris and leaves the leather shiny and looking brand new.

Corn on the Cob Flavor Booster

Boil corn with some milk in the water – about 1/2 cup – and the corn’s sweetness will heighten and its flavors will become more developed.

Shaving Cream Replacement

Run out of shaving cream? Nothing powdered milk and water can’t fix. Mix enough water with powdered sugar to produce a paste. Apply the paste to your face, underarms, and legs and shave. This simple concoction is smooth enough to resemble the real thing.

Poison Ivy Soother

To reduce the itch from an unintended stroll through a poison ivy bush, dab fresh milk or a powdered milk and water paste on the affected area. The milk will reduce the itchiness, redness, and irritation.

Sunburn Soother

Delicately pat sunburned skin with fresh milk. The milk cools the burn and the enzymes in the milk help to offset the pain.

Fertilizer

A tip from farmers and seasoned gardeners themselves – use milk as a fertilizer. Milk has been used as an organic fungicide and fertilizer without harming the plant.

Furniture Polisher

Sour milk makes for a great furniture polisher. Apply sour milk to furniture surfaces through a disposable spray bottle and wipe clean. You can also make your own sour milk, outlined above.

Milk Carton Bird Feeder

No, we didn’t forget about offering you a way to re-use the milk carton! Here is a tutorial on how to turn the carton into a bird feeder.

Images: Muffet, Striatic, Sshreeves, Jenny Downing, Gagstreet, Markusram, Robert Benner, The Living Room

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The frappuccino gets a major health revamp.

While it is high in calories, sodium, and cholesterol, it’s really the sugar content that blows one of Starbucks’s beloved beverages out of the water. Starbucks’s Caffe Vanilla Frappuccino Blended Smoothie contains 310 calories per 16-ounce serving, in addition to 3 grams of fat, 2 grams of saturated fat, 10 milligrams of cholesterol, 220 milligrams of sodium, and 67 grams of sugar.

Sugar will go straight to your head, give you a short-term high, and then leave you lethargic and glum. It spikes your blood sugar levels, leads to weight gain, is nutritionally empty, contributes to candida, and, to put simply, is actively bad for you. If you are going to consume sugar, get it from something a bit more decadent and lasting than a down-in-a-hot-second drink, regardless of how delicious it may be!

My version of a vanilla Frappuccino smoothie is sugar-free, save for the optional chocolate syrup glaze and whipped cream, using a few drops of zero-calorie, low-glycemic stevia instead. The recipe also goes a step further by replacing cow’s milk with almond milk. Almond milk is a mere 40 calories per 8-ounce serving and avoids the common issues that arise when ingesting dairy, such as hard-to-digest proteins, hormones, depletion of enzymes and vitamins through pasteurization, saturated fat, synthetic chemicals, and a boo-ing cow.

Cutting corners in so many other ways, it’s up to you whether you want to indulge with a topping of whipped cream and chocolate syrup. You can find vegan variations of both in your local health food store.

Enjoy!

Sugar-Free Vegan Vanilla Frappuccino

Ingredients:

• 1 cup coffee cooled
• 1 cup almond milk, soy milk, rice milk, or skim milk.
• 1 banana
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 handfuls of ice
• 1 tablespoon cocoa powder
• 4 drops of liquid stevia, or 2 packets of powdered stevia
• Whipped Cream (optional)
• Chocolate Syrup (optional)

Directions:

Combine all ingredients in a Vitamix and blend until smooth.

Bon Appetit!

Aylin Erman currently resides in Istanbul and is creator of plant-based recipe website GlowKitchen.

Image: Starbucks

The post Nutritional Breakdown: Vanilla Frappuccino appeared first on EcoSalon.

Fresh farmstead cheese from purebred Nubian Goats.

Got a hankering for something tastier than the mass-produced brick of cheddar on your grocer’s shelf? Try fresh goat cheese, gelato, or quark, a sour cream substitute, courtesy of Crow’s Dairy in Buckeye, Ariz.

Wendell and Rhonda Crow’s purebred Nubians produce the area’s only farmstead cheese, which means that their products are made entirely from milk produced by Crow’s goats. The animal’s diets are soy-and corn-free at the behest of customers, as well as being GMO feed free. The dairy’s products are sold at local farmer’s market and served at high-end restaurants throughout Phoenix.

Crow’s is sold at various markets in the Phoenix area, and they accept phone and mail orders, with a minimum order of $100.

Look for Lustables daily at EcoSalon. 100% gorgeous green finds, and never sponsored. Submit your favorite to tips@ecosalon.com

Image: Crow’s Dairy

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It seems that there are two kinds of milk cartons: the ones that hit you over the head with scenes of happy cows living Disney lives in beautiful pastures, and the ones that give you no information at all other than the word “˜MILK’ stamped across the front. Rarely does either provide any real indication of where the milk actually comes from – yet often, both might be from the very same farm or even the very same cows!

Every carton of milk, yogurt, ice cream and other dairy products has a code printed on it that gives us the city, state and dairy where the product was produced, but that code has never meant much to most people since looking it up was an arduous process.

Note the word was. A site called Where is My Milk From? now makes it easy to look up the origins of your dairy products. Just type in the code, found near the top of the carton or on the lid, and the site pulls up the exact plant where it was produced on a Google map, along with a list of other dairy products packaged there. Ah, technology.

Another handy function lets you see a list of dairies and processing plants in your state or even your town. It’s interesting to see how milk that’s produced locally isn’t necessarily bottled locally, and despite having a packaging plant right down the street, you’re often getting products packaged halfway across the country.

Isn’t it funny how the modern world has produced such a confusing web of food distribution, and yet technology is what’s helping us untangle it? Hurray, internets!

Photo: tauress/Flickr

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The web was buzzing with speculation – who was behind it? On April 1, Ben & Jerry’s admitted they were the creators of the site and they also conducted sampling in New York City, which you can see at the link above. Passers-by were uniformly horrified at the prospect of drinking milk from cloned cows.

All this may seem far-fetched, but in January 2008, the FDA ruled that milk and meat products from cloned animals are safe for human consumption. According to this article, producers are now selling semen from cloned cows, so clones could already be in the food chain.

People are appalled, and companies as diverse as Kraft, Wal-mart, Tyson, PCC, and Ben & Jerry’s have pledged not to use products from cloned animals knowingly. But “knowingly” is the key word here.

How are producers or consumers to know unless we have a national tracking system in place? This tracking system is what Ben & Jerry’s is pushing for. Hopefully the hoax will help raise a public ruckus around the cloning issue. But the tracking system is a band-aid. It’s our government’s job to serve us. If the public doesn’t want products from cloned animals, it’s unacceptable that they were approved in the first place.

Can someone tell me why we need cloned cows anyway? It worries me to think of the biological vulnerability inherent in a species with identical genes. It’s difficult to see any potential for public good in cloning of this nature.

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