Homemade Almond Flour

There's so much that I want to post, but for now I'll post about this.  

Homemade almond flour.  

Pre-made almond flour is fucking expensive.  A 16oz bag runs about $11.  What.The.Fuck.  I may be done with grad school, but I'm still applying for jobs and figuring my next move(s) out and let's be honest.  I'm a friggen social worker.  I'm not going to be making enough to stock my pantry with enough pre-made almond flour to satisfy my baking habit on a regular basis.    


So why almond flour if it's so damned expensive?  Well, as perviously mentioned I have a baking habit.  And since I am no longer bogged down with papers and presentations and pages and pages of reading to do on daily basis, my itch to be in my kitchen making delicious things is pretty severe right now.  Usually I bake and give away.  Which is great and kind and blah blah blah but every now and then a girl wants to have her cake and eat it too.  So I've been looking into healthier substitutes and recipes to satisfy my baking addiction that way I can bake, still give away but also keep a little with a lot less guilt.  Blah.  Okay that's the really long way to say that almond flour is a great sub for regular flour.  Jesus.  

In order to make sure that I got the right kind of texture, I first consulted the pre-made almond flour.  It looks like flour.  

The pre-made stuff.  Red Mills brand I believe.

When I was at TJ I picked up some raw, blanched, slivered almonds (per the recommendation of The Detoxinista) and dumped some into my food processor.  This is what I got.  

Looks the same, yeah?  Then I touched it.  It felt coarse.  Much more coarse than the pre-made stuff.  My blender was drying in my drying rack and I was way too impatient to wait for it.  Considered not caring about having more coarse almond flour and then I spotted our coffee grinder.  This is what I got.

I know.  They look exactly the same.  But they aren't.  The coffee grinder got the flour to a much finer powder that more closely resembled the pre-made stuff than the food processor.  So I finished the two bags I bought with the coffee grinder and put it into my freshly purchased glass jar for storage.  Two bags yielded so much more than I thought it would.  Just look at all that almond flour! 

           

I haven't baked with the stuff I made yet, but I'm assuming it's going to make everything awesome.  

Done

My last day of grad school was this past Monday.  I'm done.  I got an A on my Capstone, I have As (pretty sure at least - final grades aren't in yet) in all my classes.  I'm done.  I did it.  And without becoming an alcoholic, gaining a ton of weight from stress eating, and without ever needing a straight jacket (though this is arguable...).  I get to graduate next week.  I get my brain back.  I get to focus on my goals instead of homework.  I choreographed new routines for Zumba today which I literally have not had any time to do since before December.  I get to slow down.  I get to plan and figure out my next steps.  I'm done.  No more school.  Always learning, but no more school.  NO.MORE.SCHOOL.