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...