96 - friday

I served up punishment for breakfast this morning. a nice, tall frothy glass of extra cold green goodness. raspberry banana flavored goodness.

punishment as in, I am on a super tight budget and refuse to throw away food and so this morning my breakfast consisted of everything that was about to go bad, turned into a smoothie. yes, it looked like baby poo. but this means I've finally conquered my squeamish fear of green smoothies and am happy to report that actually, it was surprisingly delicious.

green smoothie: a photo essay


the friend of t's who he bought the house from left behind all kinds of stuff, including a large selection of small kitchen appliances.

my first task was blender selection. we inherited three, so this was no simple choice.

this, it turns out, is a "chopper bowl," not a magical smoothie-maker.

final selection: the white hamilton beach blender. it narrowly beat out the black hamilton beach blender, though only because this one was easier to retrieve from the cabinet of cooking do-dads.

next, I gathered all my ingredients. everything that was on the verge of needing to be thrown away went into this smoothie experiment. baby spinach, almost an entire half pint of raspberries, and a banana that was definitely straddling the line between ok-to-peel-and-eat and bake-me-into-bread. 

also, milk, which was neither expired nor on the verge, but provided a necessary liquid base.

everyone in the pool!

 1.5c milk

1 very ripe banana, broken into pieces

3-4c loosely packed baby spinach 

half pint ripe raspberries

conclusion? deeeeelicious. I think the key here is very ripe fruit. the combination of banana and raspberry was kind of freaking me out before I started, but it works, mostly because the raspberries tasted kind of like strawberries. raspberries lose their characteristic tartness when they're at the end of their days, and the flavorful sweetness of the ripe banana definitely masked any spinachy taste. the smoothie was also very filling - I had it just before 9am and wasn't hungry for lunch until well after 1pm. 

I'm not saying I'm going to go rushing to the grocery store to over-buy produce in hopes that I can repeat this breakfast on the daily. but I will say that punishing my produce overindulgence was pretty tasty, so I won't hate it if it happens again.