Thursday, December 21, 2006

Kale, Mango, Banana Smoothie

A cool method for getting more greens in your diet is to blend them up as smoothies.

During the late fall, I started eating more raw foods, and increasing my intake of green foods. Supposedly, there are a number of health benefits; but I also admit to a certain amount of laziness. With my morning walks, become longer and longer—thank you Nike+iPod Sport Kit—and adding semi-regular work-outs on top of those walks; I needed more energy in the mornings. But I rarely ate breakfast, because I'm not a big fan of morning cooking; and if I go out I suffer from "not what I want"-itist.

Snack bars, muffins, fruits aside, I just wanted something more satisfying and more beneficial to my overall health for breakfast. I started reading up eating green, and that also got me interested in eating raw. Now, I don't have a desire to go 100% raw with my food. But I have made an effort to make 30%-50% of my daily food intake raw. This has been made significantly easier, by making breakfast my primary raw meal of the day. I'm not super strict about it. I don't want to feel like I'm forcing myself, because I know I have a tendency to rebel against those situations. So if I wake up wanting Corn-Beef Hash, I'll walk down to Monty's and have a nice Corn-Beef Hash breakfast. On those days, I notice, I'll eat more raw snacks—yellow, red, or orange peppers, cucumbers, and pears seem to be my current favorites.

Now that I've had a couple of month's fiddling around with creating green smoothies, I'm ready to start sharing some recipes and my favorites.

Kale, Mango, Banana Smoothie

Instructions:
Make sure your greens (the Kale) are fresh and washed well. You don't want dirt sediment in your drink. Also, fresh greens just taste better so they will make a better tasting smoothie. Greens that are still viable for cooking but a little wilted or old, don't taste so great raw. They can taste wonderful steamed or sauteed; but for raw, let's just say fresher is better.

I find that mango is the all purpose fruit for green smoothies. At least for me. It's all a matter of what taste good to you. And mango with it's combination of creamy, sweetness, with a little bit of tartness makes a perfect base fruit for my favorite green drinks. I try to keep 4-5 bags of frozen mango chunks in my freezer. I tend to make most of my smoothies with at least one frozen item; because I'm not a fan of room temperature drinks, especially when they are thick. Every once and a while I need to fall back on jarred fruit—which is better than canned (sometimes); but really not so great. But its not always easy to find fresh or frozen mango, at least not at my local market in Madison, WI.

I also like banana and pears as fresh fruit additions to smoothies. If I'm looking for a creamier taste, I'll add banana. If I'm looking for a light but crisp taste, I'll add a pear.

I typically add water, tell the consistency is right for my current mood. Sometimes I want thick and creamy, other times, I want thinner more juice like drink. My goal is typically fill a one liter bottle with the smoothie. So I fiddle with the water as appropriate.

Once everything is in the blender, I use my Vita-Mix Blender typically on speed setting of 7 and blend until smooth. I really like the Vita-Mix blender a lot so far. It's handled a variety of greens, weeds (dandelion leaves, etc.), and frozen fruits and vegetables without fail, and has been a breeze to keep clean.

This drink is kind of sweet and creamy. Kale and Swiss Chard seem to offer the easiest flavors for blending. Though I try to make sure, I mix up my greens as frequently as possible. But I did find, that I'm not a fan of blended romaine lettuce. I found a number of great sounding recipes that use them, but both my first and second tries of blending with them, produced unpalatable drinks. I'm certain its some weird taste bud issue, since I eat a fair amount of salad, and various lettuce mixtures have always been welcomed and delightful there. But for drinks, Kale, Swiss Chard, Spinach, then items like Parsley, Celery, Cucumbers, Dandelion leaves, Avocado have created the best flavors for me

So there you have my favorite smoothie to date. It's not as creamy as the avocado smoothie, but I find it easy to drink, and can polish off the full liter bottle within an hour in the morning. So…breakfast is served.

Footnotes

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Categories: Green & Raw •
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