trust me, skip the pepper.

As I sit here this lovely Sunday afternoon, drinking my disgusting green smoothie, I'm thinking maybe you should know about these concoctions I've been blending up for the past week.

Here's the thing of it. Pretty much all of the women in my office drink green smoothies every day. It all started with this green smoothie girl. Now, I don't have the big bucks to shell out for her cookbook, but I have jumped on the smoothie bandwagon. Essentially, it is a way to pack in a lot more vegetables and fruits, as well as some other little health foods. Initially I was going to buy a Blendtec blender, because they are amazing, but I've just been blending in my mom's Bosch, and it is mostly just fine.

So, it started with foods we had on hand. Grapes, strawberries, frozen blueberries or mixed berries, a little lime juice, carrots, banana, and spinach. Then we tried things like mango, apple, cabbage, a wedge of lemon (with the peel), and added chia seeds. Well, we went grocery shopping yesterday, and I made a delicious smoothie. I put some strawberry kefir in the bottom, half an acai smoothie mix, four strawberries, two servings of carrots, a large leaf of kale, a large leaf of chard, a couple handfulls of spinach, a whole avocado, an apple, an orange, a kiwi, two scoops of flax, one T of chia seeds, a cup of blueberries, a slice of lemon, and a banana. It was good! And I don't mean like Jamba Juice good, but not bad, and for having that much "good stuff" in it, that's saying something.

Today I did orange juice, half an acai smoothie mix, a cup of mixed berries, 8 strawberries, spinach/kale/chard, carrots, avocado, an apple, a banana, a kiwi, lemon wedge, flax/chia, ice, and half a red pepper. Um, big mistake. The whole thing tastes like red pepper! I read something on oprah.com that said that peppers are way super good for you, and figured red bell peppers would be the least offensive, but no. I'm drinking a pepper smoothie. It isn't terrible, just not something I would ever do again. Usually banana is the overpowering flavor, but pepper covers banana.

So, the pepper has been the only gross thing so far. Mostly the smoothies are quite good. I'll keep you posted on how things go as far as weight, energy, etc.

As far as blenders go, my main complaint with the Bosch is that the pitcher is barely big enough (I would love a bigger one), and it doesn't suck the food down like the Blendtec. My blending routine involves a lot of stopping and pushing food down with a spatula. The result is quite smooth though, even with all the seeds. It is also quite thick, and with the limited pitcher size, I don't have the option of adding water.

Prep for smoothies hasn't been too bad. I'm using prewashed spinach, carrots, I rough chop the apple off the core, and just pull off the strawberry leaves. Oranges and kiwis take the most time, and mangos. Last night I froze baggies with a few handfuls of spinach, a leaf each of kale and chard, and a few strawberries (so none of those fresh things will go bad), and that should make things go a bit faster next week.

Oh, and I don't intentionally use this as meal replacement, but sometimes I'm so full afterward that I don't really eat other food. Definitely not eating smoothies for every meal around here.

That's all for now! But I'll keep you posted.

Comments

Unknown said…
Sometime you should try my KitchenAid blender. I really like it for smoothies. Although we did have the spinach and almond milk ice cream made in the hotshot blenders at Costco (those are Blendtec, or something, right?) and it was SO yummy! I have not checked to see if mine will do that.

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