Insalata Smoothie (or Juice)
I am a smoothie drinker. Almost every morning for breakfast.
While one might imagine I do it for all the health benefits that smoothies provide (It's salad! In a jar!), my predilection for blended fruits and vegetables is deeply rooted in laziness.
You see, I like to sleep. I like to sleep a lot. I particularly like to sleep in the mornings. Which means I do everything I can to eek out another 10 minutes in bed.
Enter the blender.
The night before, I gather up all of my ingredients and put them in a leftover plastic bag from the grocery store or into a bowl (sometimes I need to do two of these--one for frozen goodies and the other for refregerated ones). And then the next morning, at the last possible moment, I blend up those veggies, and pour them in a recycled jar, cap it, and take my breakfast on the go to be consumed sometime mid-morning while sitting at my desk.
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It is not glamorous. It does not smack of health consciousness (or the dreaded "detoxifying" which I have some issues with). It hardly even counts as being mindful of sustainable farming or slurping my daily requirements of fruits and vegetables.
People, it's laziness, plain and simple.
Thank goodness there are plenty of people out there willing to support my laziness. This recipe comes from the improbably named Fern Green's smoothie and juice book, entited Green Smoothies, which I wrote about here.
The smoothie is definitely chunky, in part because I don't have a high-end blender. Sigh. Some day. Also in part because Green did not recommend this particular vegetable combination as a smoothie; instead, she suggested it as a juice. Which I made as well.
Isn't it pretty? The beet makes both the juice and the smoothie that deep purple, and certainly the beet's earthiness is the dominant note in both drinks. However, this combination is a salad in a glass, and even with an extra pinch of salt, it's eons ahead of (and lower in sodium) than any canned or jarred vegetable drink on your grocer's shelves.
You'll find me sipping on this at work, sometime around 10:30, when I am finally, fully awake.
Need other smoothie recipes? Try these:
- Banana Tonic Smoothie
- Strawberry-Kiwi Candy Smoothie
- Everything but the Kitchen Sink Veggie Smoothie
- Almond Banana Smoothie
- Tropical Smoothie
- Blood Orange and Red Grape Smoothie
- Super Green Smoothie
- Peanut Butter Cup Smoothie
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Yield:
2 smoothies or 10 ounces of juice
Ingredients:
1 green pepper
1 beet
2 celery stalks
3 radishes
1/2 cucumber
Pinch of salt
1 Tbsp olive oil
Juice of 1 lemon
1 beet
2 celery stalks
3 radishes
1/2 cucumber
Pinch of salt
1 Tbsp olive oil
Juice of 1 lemon
Instructions for Smoothie:
Instructions for Juice:
Juice all of the vegetables together. Add the salt, olive oil, and lemon juice to the glass and stir.
*Here's my reason for the recycled jar, by the way: "The New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services estimates that it takes 1 million years for a glass bottle to decompose in the environment." Yikes. Thus, you will note the jars seen here are an old pepperoncini and an old salsa jar.
Juice all of the vegetables together. Add the salt, olive oil, and lemon juice to the glass and stir.
*Here's my reason for the recycled jar, by the way: "The New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services estimates that it takes 1 million years for a glass bottle to decompose in the environment." Yikes. Thus, you will note the jars seen here are an old pepperoncini and an old salsa jar.
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