Homemade Almond Pulp Body Scrub with Coconut Oil, Cinnamon, Coconut Sugar, & Sea Salt

As most of you know, Homemade Almond Milk is sort of my thing. I started making it weekly a year and a half ago, 33oz per week of it to be exact, and I've never looked back. I use it almost exclusively as a replacement for the half & half that I used to pour in my iced triple espresso every morning - and I absolutely adore it. The recipe is simple, a small bowl full of water-soaked almonds, 33oz of filtered water, 2 pitted dates. The dilemma comes in as I've started to understand that the rising demand for almonds has a bit of strain on some environmental issues. One is that most of the countries almonds are produced in California and since I live in Chicago that means those almonds have to travel (cough cough: carbon footprint). The second being that, for a plant, almonds use a lot of water to be produced, and with the draughts, in recent years in California this is obviously a bit of an issue from a demand standpoint.

However here's where I am able to justify. I'm not ready to be enough of a bad ass to just drink my espresso black, and I think that despite some of the downfalls, choosing almond milk is still more morally sound in my mind than choosing cows milk. And from a health perspective, I am still more interested in nut milk than soy or rice milk. I'm also not producing gallons of the stuff every week, it's a small portion of what I consume on a regular basis.

The one area that I have totally struggled with morally, and have mentioned in this post & this post, is how to use up the leftover pulp! I've tried muffins and bites and while they're fine, they just aren't something that I want to make and eat every single week (if they are for you, GREAT). So I recently read somewhere that the almond pulp could be used as an exfoliator, aka a body scrub and instantly knew that was something I could get on board with. In fact, I've been experimenting with new products because I am really looking to transition to more natural home and skin care products.

So without further ado (sorry for the long-winded post!), I present to you my franken-recipe which borrowed from a number of different things I found on the interwebs and mainly is created out of what I had in the pantry.

What I Used: