I interrupt your (ir)regular crafty programming...

for milk.

Sorry guys. I have to have a little rave about milk.

Noone in our house drinks plain milk, so we keep UHT on hand for the odd time I want to make a cheese sauce or a lemon delicious. Badly Coloured Boy drinks flavoured milk every morning (yep, we're grown ups). I do not.

Last night while prowling the aisles of Fresh Provisions in search of something that was healthy, 'snack-like' and only had ingredients that I knew what they were, I decided it was time to bite the bullet and try Bannister Downs milk. I knew it had won a lot of awards. I knew it came in the most awesome calcium-carbonate biodegradable pouch. I knew it cost $4.50 a litre (flavoured)!

I did not know that milk could taste so good. So amazingly, astonishingly good. Their low-fat chocolate milk has a mouthfeel creamier than supermarket full-cream. It was rich and cocoa-y, but not too sweet. The ingredients on the chocolatte flavour? Milk, dutch cocoa, sugar. No emulsifiers, or vegetable gums, or chocolate syrup! If I don't drink the whole litre in 24 hours I'm going to warm some up in a pan and have instant hot chocolate.

I don't think Bannister Downs is available outside WA, so, well, sucks to the rest of the world! More helpfully, all I can encourage you to do is to seek out a local, independent, environmentally aware dairy near you that cares about their product. I can't believe I have lived for 23 years without knowing that this is what milk can and is supposed to taste like. I must check with BCB, who grew up on a dairy farm (and an orchard, and has done time on nearly every organic farm between here and Nimbim, courtesy of his wandering mother) whether fresh-from-the-dairy milk is like BD. While it mightn't be practical for those families that go through a couple of litres a day to be buying BD, our low-milk consuming household shall be buying nothing but from here on in.