Jumping into the Green Smoothie Lifestyle

Since I've been in San Diego I've been making "green smoothies" once or twice a day! I'm using a "regular" blender so the drinks take a bit longer to get smooth...and sometimes I just don't have the patience so I'm not sure if they'd ever really become smooth and homogeneous with a regular blender.

Spinach plus banana plus a cup of apple juice was the base for the sweet fruit smoothies. Sometime I add mint, agave, lettuce, parsely (perjil), mango, apple, ginger...Once I had no spinah and just used the other greens and I ended up with a "hairy" drink which was weird!

Recently I've been making spinach soup by blending a cup of cashews with 2 cups of hot water then adding a bunch of spinach and a bit of sea salt and cayenne. It's very delicious and if I didn't know the ingredients I'd guess it was made from asparagus and cow's milk!

Now I'm having my very own V8! It has tomatoes, celery, parsely, mint, spinach, water, sea salt, cucmber rind. I swish to stir then take a drink. The blended elements tend to separate over time with the fluffy stuff rising and the heavier stuff sinking. I'm drinking it "on the rocks" and am finding the drink very tasty and satisfying.

The Alisa Cohen book that I got is half cookbook. Eventually I'll get that and try some things out. For now it's packed away for re-discovery sometime next year by me or Dad.

One thing that I've discovered is that

• green smoothies are best when they are really smooth and cold.
• I also like green drinks that are NOT thick.
• And these green drinks can be HOT or COLD, THICK or THIN and can be full of so much FLAVOR!

Cooking Class...real cooking

Vita Mix can be used for more than Green Smoothies!

pretty cool...I like the way that a healthy diet is a healthy diet and there is no special diet for mom and another one for her family. it just occurred to me recently that in order for me to eat cooked food just for protein until I actually own a Vita-Mix and can drink enough greens and nuts to get the 45 grams of protein or so that I need. I'm thinking along the lines of one part rice, 2 parts beans, 3 parts pico de gallo! Fresh pico de gallo will provide vital nutrients and enzymes to the mix. yay!

Okay. Enough of that. This is the most extreme...

p
What I like about this is her love of cooking and of preparing tasty, beautiful food that has lots of fresh, organic ingredients...yeah, she is still into heating but that just because...I bet she'll be more into raw as her knowlege and exploration deepens. For now, she drives home a point, food can be a pleasure, a supreme pleasure!

Nutrition

Listening, repeatedly, to the the lectures series of Nancy Amy at UC Berkeley Introduction to Human Nutrition Spring 2007, has been a wonderful gift to me. Right now I do not have the luxury of not paying attention to my consumption.

In fact I've been consuming the cleanest most natural food I had access to for most of this year. The problem was that I did not have access to enough food and I was not considering my protein intake. Now I weigh 59kg (130 lbs) and I've learned that .8 kg/ kg body weight is a reasonable base line. I've also come to understand that my protein intake has been significantly less than that and my caloric intake and nutrient range has been unbalanced and not congruent with my actual physiological needs.

So for me to actually consume sufficient calories and the wide breadth of nutrients including 47 g protein per day will require two things: Access to fresh produce in abundance year round and a manual blender so that I can drink the food. (So I can consume enough to get the nutrients I need)

Two sources of cooked food, sprouted wheat bagels (11g/bagel) and hummus(8g/ half cup) have, entered my diet as what I considered a necessity to increase my protein intake wtihout having to eat beyond the point of comfort.

Obviously we do not know in text book terms all that we need to consume to be optimally healthy. I'm sticking with the idea that I have co evolved with my food and that this man-made garbage these man-made monstrosities are not about food and nutrition but about corporate money profit. That's not "food" for me.

Nuts in general are high in protein:
These are the grams contained in 1/4 cup of the following nuts
8 sunflower
8 peanuts
7 almonds
7 pumpkin
7 sesame
6 pistachios
5 Brazil nuts
5 filberts
5 walnuts
4 cashews
4 pine nuts

There is protein in most fruits and vegetables! However for me to get my protein from those alone would require lots of chewing or lots of drinking...Drinking is faster, even with saliva integration.

Bananas have all of the essential amino acids plus two extra to boot. "Essential amino acids" are those humans are ill equipped to manufacture ourselves bu which we need to survive so we have to consume them. A banana has 1 to 2 grams of protein..depends on how big the banana is. (Proteins consist of amino acids linked together.)

I'm going to send this to my dad, it might be more accessible. Professor Nancy Amy, Nutrition 10 at UCB...Fantastic overview. Specific enough to be immediately useful is remarkable!

It is accessible through iTunesU at iTunes or through the link provided above.

Vegan Cashew Milk & Green Soothie

I love these videos for their multilingual subtitles. Yummy. :)

Spoon-able Banana Chocolate Smoothie

This is a great example of usingthe equipment on hand. FFreezing chunks of banana and then putting those into a Vitamix is cleaner and much more efficient.

In general, I don't find strawberries sweet. The Driscoll company seems to sell "swwet" strawberies. Maybe I should buy a package and harvest the seeds for future use. ;)

Smoothie Song

..just because.

Cui Bono From Making Good Whole Smoothies a Joke?

This is NOT what entertanment should be about. Notice how indeed the banana over powers the flavor of the raw veggies. Also note Mr Enriquez is using a Vitamix which can easily handle all of the ingredients at once.

When Mama Drinks a Smoothie, Little Baby Goes Wild

Vegan Ultra Power Smoothie

A "power smoothie"? Cool, Dad would like this! Thisis NOT a vegan smoothie if the yoghurt was made from the maternal milk of an animal e.. a cow. Also unfermentd soy I consider a poor choice. Please note the degree of maniulation and time required to blend the smoothie ingredients together.. When working with a less than 3.5 hp machne add the liquid first and ONE ingredient. Blend until smooth THEN add the next ingredient,blend again until smooth. And so on and so forth until all ingredients have been added.

Peach Coconut Smoothie with Hemp Protein

Isn't this funny. Just goes to show you can just set up your camera and do your thing in the kitchen and put it up on YouTube. It can be entertaining and give others some good ideas, too. This is a smoothie that seems to not have turned out as the chef would have liked. I'm not sure why he didn't just pour it back in the bender and add some more ingredients to make it more to his liking...maybe he was out of peaches. Sounds like he would have liked a stronger peach flavor and a sweeter taste as well.

For "sweet" it's good to have dates, agave (ah-GAH-veh), and/or honey on hand. No forget about pure cane sugar unless you are harvesting it yourself. Even then, it's really a poor source of nutrition.

Homemade "Nutella" and an AWESOME Smoothie

Paris and Nutella, inseparable for me. Anyway, here is anotehr smoothie and also a nutella-like spread that is sure to be popular for raw vegans and everyhbody else, respectfl of the body-temple,who enjoy the taste of Nutella.

I would not, personally, call this a "killer" smoothie. Words and symbols are really powerful. I'd call it an "awesome" smoothie. ;)

Raw for 30 Days

Some people use smoothies as a convenient and tasty way to increase their intake of raw fruits and vegetables. Some people even use them as a way to transition to a raw food diet. Take a look at this video to see what a raw food diet can mean....compare it to what a "super sie me" diet yields...

The Price of Sugar

Here is yet one more reason why your not eating refined sugar is a good thing. Not only is it bad for your health, it's bad for the health of the people involved iwth the growing and harvesting and processing of the sugar. Check out th trailer.




Thank you, Kevin.

Veggie Therapy

...just because. There are so many ways to communicate a notion. This was a cute video which Kevin of Lord Supreme Being Vegan alerted me to. ;)

Equipment Needed

To convert clean real food into a green smoothie use what you have. If all you have is your body then take small bites and chew untl you hae a creay consistency and then swallow.

If in additon to your body you have a blender. Fine, use it. The horse power and durability of the juicer will determine how much you have to cut up the whole food before putting it into the mix. So you add your chopped whole food andsome pure water. For sweetness you can add pitted dates, agave or raw honey. By the way honey is an animal product that is avoiced by some vegans. Personally I don't know enouhg about honey in th elife cycle of bees to feel drawn to or repulsed by the notion of cosuming honey. I'm neutral on the subject.

If you have a juicer. Fine, use it. A juicer grins the food to a pulp and extracts the juice in the process. You drink the extrat. The pulp can also be eaten. In the past I've used the pulp as an ingrediet to ake veggie burgurs. I've also used it to make a poultice and a face mask.

Both a juicer and a blender can result in smeting that you can drink. The blener give u the whole food in liquid form. The Juicer is giving you oly the extracted juice.

We do not digest cellulose, the stuff of plant cell walls however roughage (the pup, the cellulose) is a physical way to move bulk into , throgh and out of our lower bowel. And..who konw what. I've heard that excess estrogen is elimnated through the bowel and that a high fiber diet encourages such elimination.

I love the way Ani puts it. I love the way Victoria sees it. For me, my natural food and I have co-evolved. We are a perfect match. For me consuming whle food is the best. Assisting my body with chewing (blending/liquifying) before consumption is a way to increase the amount of what I eat that is actually digested and absorbed.

Jason Vale and the Miracle of Juicing

"biologique" is a term used as we use "organic". "Anais" is a term used as we use "pineapple" Note the comment about heating.

What a nice thing to lie wel, produce srplus and share the surplus in exchange for what we may need that we ourselves do not produce. Yes, a greem business is where it is at. I just had a wonderful juice of whole pineable, whole celery, a clove of garlic and a third of a jalapeno pepper. Marvelous, simply MARVELOUS. I wonder what Dad is putting in his power drink this morning.

Ultimate Smoothie with David Wolfe

Whatcha Gonna Feed Your Prety Little Baby?

Colonic at Tummy Temple

This is a gentle, yet mechanical, way of clearning the colon of debris. It is gnerally more effective than inserting a low melting slippery object into the rectum or using an enema bag at home. Using a olema board at home is probably the closest way of replicating the colonic experience at home without all of the high tech equipment.

This has nothing to do with green smoothies directly. Some people change their consumption for the express purpose of "cleanisn" their colon, so I wanted to ad ths post for educational/awareness purposes.

A clean raw vegan diet with plenty of hydration, sleep and physical motion an sunlight should be in and of itself "cleansing." Getting rid of ingested toxins and created wasts is a natual bodily function. Like theperson in the videosays, he was using colon hydrotherapy as a starting point to mark hs entry onto the path to improved health and fitnesss.

Vegetarian Video by a Vegetarian

This video, unlike the one in the post below, has next to no gore. The other one is full of gore. Anyway, it's all true, this is how animal products are produced--these are the raw ingredients--pain, filth, torture, drugs, disease, murder...

Yeah, I think I'll have a mango and have a pineapple-green smoothie. How 'bout you?

Reasons to Be a Vegetarian

For even more graphic gore visit my MySpace friend, "VeganTHIS"

Even People Who Eat Animals Use Vitamix!

By the way, eating animals, eating plants, eating animal parts and product, eating plant parts and products...to live we consume life. Now of course some of us do not consume life. For a growing number of us on the planet our intake is more and more the product of an industrial labs synthesis.

All that to say, I don't eat animals but I am not holier than thou. Maybe I'm just choosing to be responsible for my health, choosing to be independent of a pharmaceutical-medical industry whose reason for being is NOT my welfare but their monetary bottom line.

Sesame Seed Milk

Notice the comment regarding the benefit of a 3.5(horsepower?) blender: more thorough break down in a shorter time. The chef hints at the fact that all of this motion is generating heat and if someone is concerned about maintaining the vitality of the enzymes contained in the seeds. Heat kills enzymes. That's why its healthier not to eat cooked food. Eating food that hasn't been cooked means that we are eating food that contains within itself the enzymes needed to digest it!

Also notice she is using agave, which can be light or dark in color. The nut milk bag can be purchased as such however you can also buy a bag used to filter paint. It's less expensive. Also you can make a bag using fabric that you have on hand. I have used a thin and age old scarf as a filter. No problem. ;)

Hey, I've worn my hair like that before!

Almond Milk

Fuzzy Navel Smoothie

By the way, Ani has a company called Smart Monkey Foods. I ordered their raw food bars and they were all DELICIOUS! My personal favorite are the sesame snap and the ginger snap. You can get a variety pack of 4 or 6 directly from their site or cases of any of the 6+ varieties from Amazon (linked from Smart Monkey).

Oh, and you can hear an interview of Ani Phyo on Raw Vegan Radio.

Ani pronounces "Phyo" this way: pea (like, "green pea") + oh (like "oh, I knew that!)

Chocolate Smoothie

I think I'd like to try raw cacao (chocolate)...and I'd definitely want MORE dates and MORE chocolate and MORE nuts! Hey, ever tried agave? Me, neither but some "purists" use it in lieu of honey because it's natural production has nothing to do with animals (or insects...buzzzzzz)

Brown Smoothies

Green Smoothie

Chimpanzees & Humans & Victoria's Discovery

• Chimpanzees and humans are nearly 99% genetically identical.
• Humans are the only creature that cook their food
• Cooking destroys the enzymes contained in the food
• Cooked food therefore is more difficult to digest--more time, more work

It occured to Victoria Boutenko that if human and chimpanzees are so closely related genetically, evolutionarily, then perhaps it would be a healthy thing, even a health restoring thing, to eat as chimpanzees eat. No, I don't mean poking sticks in ant holes or termite dens and dragging the insect filled sticks across our tongues.

Visit the Raw Family and pick up Victoria's book if you're interested. Also check out their event/presentation schedule. They will be at this years Raw Spirit Festival in Sedona Arizona USA.

Very Simply Liquid Greens

Real Food for Real People

What is real food for real people you ask? Well the picture above is a big hint.

And here is another hint as to what it is NOT! If you haven't seen "Super Size Me" you may enjoy it.

Okay so, for real people, here's my definition of "real food".

Real food is that which can be found naturally in nature and that can be eaten whole without ill effect. An apple is an example of "real food". An apple put into a blender with a bit of pure water and liquified is an example of processed "real food"...that is still "real food."

A big mac with fries and a shake is NOT an example of "real food". Not even if you put it all in a super duper blender and serve it to your toothless uncle for lunch. Now you wouldn't try something like that would you? Putting it in a blender does not make it "real food" either!