Tag Archive: pears

Green smoothie before bed; the best medicine

Written on February 10, 2009 by hollie in Raw Foods, Recipes, Weight Loss

I’ve been eating horribly the last few weeks, which is about how long I’ve been in school. I’m sure these two things are connected. When stressed, I go toward the familiar foods, and I’ve been eating loads and loads of high-fat carbs, chicken (ugh), and sugar. I’ve gained three pounds. I can feel it around my middle, which disturbs me; easily 75% of my excess fat is the stress fat that hovers around the internal organs, the kind that is supposed to be extra-unfriendly to longevity.

Tonight’s remedy: a green smoothie before bed. Specifically about 32 ounces. I began to notice this “medicinal” effect of green smoothies after I’d been drinking them for awhile and then tapered off. I’d start to feel worn down, overwhelmed, and my body would feel achey and slow. If I made a green smoothie before bed and drank a ton of it right before I went to sleep, I woke up feeling like someone sprayed me down with Awesome.

Another benefit is that it seems to calm whatever sugar cravings I’m having. The trick here, when beginning to realize you’ve had a nutritionally bankrupt period, is to actually go make the smoothie, which means getting oneself out of whatever carb and stress-induced torpor you’ve managed to roll yourself into. Often this involves a trip to the store for fresh kale and fruit, which can feel like oh such a burden when you’re already swamped with plays to read, notes to go over, and homework to make sure your first grader does. In the larger scheme of things, these are small problems, but in the moment they can feel like more than enough to send you back to the couch with your Chips Ahoy and your remote control. Just one more cookie won’t hurt, will it?

But I try to remind myself it’s well worth it. If there were a pill they could make that made me feel this good, the side effects would likely be as ridiculous as the cost, and I’m sure I’d stand in line to get it. Green smoothies are available at any grocery store for maybe $2.50 per quart, and are, in my opinion, nothing less than nutritional magic. The one sitting next to me is half of the following recipe:

Recovery Smoothie

2/3rds a head of kale (usually I use half, but tonight I was feeling green)
2 small satsumas
2 T flax oil
2 T lemon juice
2 pears, one very ripe, one still pretty firm

IT TASTES DELICIOUS. I am not kidding. I know people find this blog and they read “green smoothie”, and say to themselves CUCKOO!, but I’m telling you, it’s fantastic. I’ll drink an entire 32 oz jar before I fall asleep, and then let it work its magic. In the morning, before I go to school, I’ll try to drink the remaining jar, or most of it.

Now if I could just get back to drinking them every day, I might end up like Clent.

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Fifteen pounds of pears!

Written on September 18, 2008 by hollie in Questions for the Audience, Recipes

If you had a 15-pound box of rapidly ripening pears, what would you do with them?

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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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