Simply Green

Top o’ the mornin’ to ya!

I had another simple pleasure planned this week, but then I looked at a calendar and changed my mind. I couldn’t neglect the most festive Thursday of the year. So today, in celebration of the greenest day on the calendar, I'm sharing my greenest simple pleasure, the green smoothie.

I first heard about green smoothies a few years ago somewhere out in Cyber Land. I clicked a link and discovered a woman gushing about her incredible health and beauty makeover and extolling the virtues of drinking spinach for breakfast.

Now, I'm not at all a fan of cooked or canned spinach. Call me crazy, but I have a personal aversion to anything that resembles sewage.  Fresh spinach, however, I can handle. Plus, the words beauty makeover kind of sucked me in so I decided to dub it an adventure and give it a try.

It was delicious.

OK, it wasn't immediately delicous. Cyber woman made  hers with water, spinach and bananas. One sip, and I knew it was a project that needed some tweaking.  I replaced the water with ice and a splash of juice, and I froze the bananas. I also threw in some other fruit for good measure.

And then, I added a little sweetener. Yeah,I know that kind of negates the healthy part.

And then, it was delicious. Seriously, you can't taste the green part at all.

Over the years, it has become a little hobby for me to create new green concoctions. It's kind of like those My Favorite Cookies that I've yakked about before.

I've made them with spinach, with collard greens, and kale. (I once tried to use mustard greens because no one warned me that the mustard in the name is not just figurative. I wouldn't recommend it.) I've used pineapples, peaches, pears, and even apples.  The man of the house likes his with a little orange marmalade mixed in.

For aesthetic purposes, I stick with green or yellow fruits. Whirring in something like strawberries might sound like a good idea, but they just turn it into a brown smoothie. Then, you have that whole sewage issue going on.

Green smoothies, of course, are not a winter treat. I enjoy them through the spring and summer and then on no certain day in October, I pretty much send the blender into hibernation. Because I’m the kind of gal who likes tradition, I always open green smoothie season on St. Patrick’s Day.

And that's what I did this morning.
I feel thinner already.

Making green smoothies is this week's simple pleasure.

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Sharing with Dayle at A Collection of This and That

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