Tag Archive: green smoothie

Tweaking the Kale Smoothie

Written on September 9, 2008 by hollie in Recipes, Smoothies - Green and Otherwise

A lot of people taste the smoothies I make and think they taste too “green”. I can handle the flavor because I’ve gotten used to it over time. But there are ways to tweak it:

  • Make sure your fruit is very ripe. Maybe even overripe. You can toss some pretty funky bananas into those things, and it will taste delicious.
  • Try different fruit. My recipe usually has apples, but that’s because you can get apples year-round. Another delicious variation is pears. Three pears (you don’t have to toss the seeds, booyah) are a great alternative, or you can mix and match your fruit, too.
  • Add a couple teaspoons of table sugar, or honey. This won’t kill you, I promise. If you make the smoothie from the recipe I posted, you’ll have nearly a quart of green drink. That is a Nutritional Bomb of Awesome(tm), and a teaspoon or two of sugar is not going to ruin that. Besides, as you get more used to the flavor, you end up using less sweetener, and then no sweetener, so it’s just helping you along. There’s a reason why we call it a crutch. It’s okay to use one for awhile.
  • Use less kale. Start by making a fruit smoothie with two leaves of kale, or even one. Hey, if you’re like me, and you didn’t even know what kale was until you were over thirty, then a one-leaf green smoothie is still AWESOME PROGRESS. Don’t knock it. Suck it up. Do that for a few weeks. Eventually toss in a little more. Slow but steady wins the race.

My lovely friend Katje asked:

So I get why you don’t want to consume a bunch of seeds… but why on earth do you bother peeling them?

If you use apples, and you don’t peel them, then the smoothie will taste much more bland, be noticeably less sweet, and the pectin in the skins will make it form smoothie glubules that are, shall we say, less than enticing. It’s like Green Sludge instead of Green Smoothie. If you’re one of those people who just believes in apple peels, and I’ve met them, the people who think that peeling an apple is a nutritional crime so abonimable that you might as well just put down the apple and get a pack of Ding Dongs* and stop pretending, well then I say just don’t peel them. Or just peel one. It’s all up to you. This is the beauty of the green smoothie.

*And here I might add that if you DO decide to just put down the apple and get some Ding Dongs, to freeze them first. Frozen Ding Dongs are strangely good. Not delicious, mind you – we all know Ding Dongs are merely a chocolate and sweetened-lard farce – but when frozen, they approach a certain eating-in-your-pajamas-while-watching-a-romantic-comdey respectability. Now, frozen Twinkies; those are delicious.

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Kale smoothies FTW

Written on September 8, 2008 by hollie in Posts with Photos, Raw Foods, Recipes, Smoothies - Green and Otherwise

Kale smoothie FTW

I know what you’re thinking, believe me, I do. If someone told me ten years ago that I’d someday be enjoying smoothies made from kale, I’d have told them they were a couple bulbs short of a box, and they needed professional help.

But here it is, in all its considerable non-glory:

Hollie’s Favorite Kale Smoothie

3 C cold water
1/2 bunch of clean, washed, fresh kale
1 ripe banana
3 small-medium apples, peeled (take out the seeds*, but leave the cores if you want)
a dash of lemon juice

Put the water into the Vita-Mix. Add the apples, and then pile on as much kale as you possibly can. I get about half a whole bunch in. Put the Vita-Mix on “high”, and use the tamper to push down the kale into the blades. It shouldn’t take much doing. Whip it up for several seconds until you see that all the greens are blended. This takes about half a minute or so for me.

Voila! Tasty green beverage, that is so weird your friends and family will probably wonder what came over you, so be ready for the jokes: “Who are you and what did you do with my wife?” Greg, at first, was shocked I’d drink such a thing, but now even he likes them. Our three-year-old will drink them too, she calls them a “Green Smoothie”, which is what a lot of people call them. Our six-year-old, well, he thinks that peanut butter and jelly sandwhiches should be a staple served at every meal.

After I started drinking these early this year, I started to feel amazing. I had more energy, my digestion improved (which is a polite way of saying “more pleasantly efficient”, if you catch my drift), and through drinking them regularly I developed more of a taste for green vegetables. I now eat salads a lot more often, and with much greature pleasure. Green smoothies become a habit after awhile, and when I fell out of the habit after I started taking a couple classes at school, I really noticed the difference.

*That whole apple seed cyanide issue. Basically, if you’re going to juice or blend apples, you generally want to remove the seeds. Apple seeds (or “pips”) contain chemicals that will degrade into cyanide when metabolized. Our bodies can handle cyanide in small amounts, which is why a few swallowed pips won’t hurt you. Also, the pips tend to stay intact in most bodies, so you’ll generally just poop them out. However, if you’re eating a green smoothie every day like I try to, that means I’m getting a lot of seeds, and the blending (or juicing, if you do that too, like I do) means they’re being crused open, and while it’s still unlikely I’d get sick, it’s much better to be safe than sorry. So ditch your apple seeds. If one or two get in here or there, no worries. But in general try not to eat them, and especially try not to blend or juice them.

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