Evolution of a Green Smoothie

Weekend days are awesome for green smoothies for one important reason: if I mess up the smoothie, I can fix it. On, say, a Friday morning, if I happen to add too much water to my morning smoothie and it ends up a bit soupy, tough for me- I gots to go teach kids some math. But on Sunday morning? Just chop up some more apples, throw in some more baby carrots, and stuff the thing with a couple more handfuls of spinach.

The evolution of a smoothie:

1) It started out with that top left picture. I had acquired a lot of oranges, apples, bananas, and grapes from leftover lunches, so I decided to put them to good use. I don't usually put oranges in smoothies, since it takes longer to get the skin off, but, as it was Sunday morning, I wanted to add those in. Can't get too much Vitamin C, right? The rest of our tropical mix frozen fruits from Costco went in as well. I also threw in some carrots, which I've never done before because I was too afraid. But yesterday we happened to stop at Jamba Juice and tried their green smoothies with carrots, and it wasn't bad. So I took a risk.

2) The second picture shows the smoothie with all those orangey and yellowy colors mixed up. I almost wanted to drink it like that, instead of adding the greens which would inevitably turn that beautiful light color, well, green. But I also want Chris and me to get as many greens into us as possible, so in went the spinach and the bok choy on top of the orange.

3) Normally I add water to help the blender break up the frozen fruits, but since there were mostly fresh things in this smoothie so far, I really hadn't needed to. My smoothie at this point was pretty thick, though, so I knew I needed some kind of liquid to make it more smoothie and less something we needed a spoon to eat. Sometimes I add in almond milk, but ours was expired. (Those things don't really last forever, apparently.) But we did have a few mouthfuls of V8 Splash left, so I dumped that in there and gave it a whirl.

   Way. Too. Much. Liquid. Dang it.
   
   But lucky for me, it was Sunday, and I still had plenty of room to pack the blender with some more liquid absorbing items. In went another apple, another banana, another handful of spinach, and a whopping amount of carrots, way more than I'd put in originally. (I was throwing caution to the wind at this point. Plus I figured with the V8 Splash, it would probably taste pretty yummy even I threw some cauliflower and green beans in there.)


4) And the last picture shows the final product. It was the perfect texture and absolutely delicious. I didn't even have to add any Stevia thanks to the V8 Splash, and that thing had quite a bit of veggies in it.


So what did we learn today?

1) Carrots are not to be feared in smoothies.

2) A little V8 Splash really livens up a green smoothie.

3) Use liquids sparingly, unless you want a giant vat of green smoothie. (It was okay today, since Chris and I both wanted one, and I poured the rest in a eco cup to take with us to our newborn shoot today.)