Cashew milk

I finally got my act together and tried making cashew milk. I've been meaning to make it for years ever since I tried someone else's homemade cashew milk and was amazed by how delicious it was,  but always put it off for lack of cheesecloth. So when I discovered an open packet of raw cashews in the pantry I thought the time had finally come!

I made my milk based on these two recipes:

 http://cookieandkate.com/2013/cashew-milk-recipe/

 http://theshiksa.com/2013/06/11/how-to-make-cashew-milk/

Sadly, I think my cashew-milk-making needs a bit of refinement. Even though I followed the recipes in terms of how much water I added, my milk seemed more watery than I expected. There were also some issues with excess grain sneaking through the strainer and into my glass - I may need to get a finer strainer for next time. My blender is also incredibly old - older than me in fact - so probably not the best at grinding up those cashews. I had a lot of pulp left over - more than was shown in the recipe which freaked me out a bit - but again it's probably the blender.

Both recipes say to add a sweeter, vanilla and salt to the mix. Not being a honey eater, I added a little Stevia powder to mine which I think worked well as I did not want the milk to be really sweet anyhow. Maybe next time I will try it without the sweetener just to see what it's like. The vanilla extract on the other hand I'm not so happy with. In my opinion it gives it a really strong vanilla flavor even though I only added a few tiny drops - and to be honest I don't really want my nut milk to taste like vanilla...so next time I'll try leaving that out too.

Since I have so much pulp left over, I am curious to see if I can use it to make something else - gonna have to do some investigating. If you have any tips I'd love to hear them.

** Update ** The milk tastes way better once it's chilled & the strong vanilla flavour faded

Also - I did not use *filtered water* like the recipes said. I do not drink filtered water nor do I have a water filter. I am a bit puzzled as to why every nut milk recipe I see says to use *filtered water* ? IS it simply that the 'types' of people who tend to be interested in drinking nut milk tend to also be health freaks? Or is it that one person used it and then everyone else based their recipes on theirs which used filtered water?...

Also discovered that you can freeze the leftover nut pulp and save it to use in baking or to sprinkle over cereals. Also stumbled upon this pin board which has a few nut pulp recipe ideas. I like the look of this fudge recipe.