Damn Simple Green Smoothie

I enjoy exploring food, in the laziest way possible.

Eating and trying new foods has not always been a pastime of mine – my parents could attest to more than one night of making myself a bologna and cheese sandwich for dinner because I didn’t want what they were serving (I might’ve been a picky child), but I have always gravitated towards simple foods.

The shortest path from beginning to end. How many ingredients, for example, should be in a regular block of cheddar cheese? According to my blue-wrapped block of (white, not dyed orange) cheddar Tillamook, it’s three – milk, salt and cultured enzymes.

Make Me a Smoothie, Clown

This has led me to the easiest (and laziest, sense a theme?) recipe for a green smoothie I’ve found. The theme here is whatever’s lying around will work just fine, but my particular go-to (because I generally have these already) –

• 1 cup almond milk (40 calories)
• 2 cups spinach (30 calories)
• 1 cucumber (50ish calories)
• 2 carrots (50ish calories)
• 2 cups frozen fruit (150-200 calories)

Ingredients

Brought to you by (again) whatever I have lying around, which happens to be this stuff. Important note here – use whatever you’ve already got, I’ve used kale instead of spinach (like half the kale bundle instead of my three handfuls of spinach), frozen mango or a banana and an apple instead of the blueberries, coconut milk instead of almond milk – go wild.

Shoot for –

• 1 cup milk
• 2 handfuls of greens
• 1 cucumber to mellow any bitterness from spinach and kale
• 1-2 cups of some fruit to provide just enough sweetness to enjoy it, but not enough to turn this into green kool-aid

This’ll net you ~350ish calories which I usually split with a small lunch.

This step might be optional, but my blender’s old as hell so I have to pre-chop everything.

If this blender can do it, so can yours.

I can’t cram everything in at once or it gets stuck and doesn’t fall down into the blades, so I go bit by bit.

Boom. You’ve just eaten your greens, woah.