Milkshakes - the healthy way

It's April in Cape Town. Officially Autumn is underway...so why am I so hot? The craving for something cold and sinfully delicious leads to today's recipe. Bear with me, it may seem a bit tedious.You will get a healthy, dairy free  version - infinitely better for you; or cheat and use use dairy milk. Just let me finish slurping up my guilt free double thick chocolate milkshake. No one to hear...so one more looooong, SLURP....ok, I will write now and try to concentrate.

Whenever I buy banana's (yes - organic ones), we get halfway through the bunch and they get ever riper. Short of weekly banana breads the solution is to slice them up into chunks and freeze. This is the start of the  milkshake, and I don't even LIKE banana's!

Nut milk:

1 cup almonds, soaked for at least one hour then drained
1 Litre water
1 T honey or agave
4 dried figs, optional, just makes the milk a bit sweeter
Blend all ingredients together very well, strain through a muslin cloth/cheesecloth/mutton cloth/nut milk bag
(You need to squeeze all the liquid out)
Refrigerate.

Milkshake: (for one greedy person like myself)
1 cup nut milk
1 frozen banana (just guess)
1 T honey, optional
Blend together very well, may need to stir.

For the chocolate version, add
1 T cocoa powder (more if not chocolatey enough)

Now its time to play: add some mint leaves, or Maca powder if you have the healthy stuff, or anything that you think would catch your fancy. The basic banana milkshake is delicious, and then you can add flavour as you please, including different fruit for flavour. Just be aware blueberries taste too close to banana when added.

If you don't want to go the nut milk route, use ordinary milk and proceed. I guess rice milk or soya milk would also work.
Remaining nut milk is good for 4-5 days kept in fridge and is superb with muesli for breakfast.