Simple Green Monster

This gorgeous gal mentioned these green smoothies she’d been making for her post work out snack ages ago, but I finally just got around to making one today. There’s a bit of a funny story behind it, actually. I kept saying, “Today is the day!”, but as it turned out, I was always missing key ingredients. And then I’d forget to add, say flax seeds, to the list of groceries and get everything else, and then go, well crap! But I was determined, because these “Green Monsters” are supposed to be fantastic energy boosters, among other amazing benefits.

The special ingredient for these babies is the spinach! But before you freak out and tell me you hate spinach, (how on earth could you hate spinach?!) hear me out! Spinach is pretty amazing. It’s a great source of Iron, which is important for you veggies out there. This is sort of a side note, but I have 0- blood type, and have always felt that donating blood was extremely important. When I adopted the vegetarian diet, my ability to donate went out the window because I just couldn’t get my iron count high enough. It’s my hope that these smoothies will give me that ability back! But spinach has lots of other good qualities, too. It’s a great source for a wealth of vitamins (A, C, E, K, B2, B6), potassium, protein, and omega-3 fatty acids. What the heck do I care? Well, what all that means is though you’re bound to have increased energy, you can also look forward to hair & nail growth, clear glowing skin, better sleep, a diminished sweet tooth, and a happy heart! There’s lots more, but I figured those would be the ones cared about most.

Although I love spinach, even I was hesitant to have a spinach smoothie. It just didn’t sound very appetizing. But, like I said, I was determined to at least try it. And what do you know, you can’t even taste the spinach! Today I tried the very basic smoothie, and had it for breakfast, it was delicious. Tomorrow I will add fruit!

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon flax seeds
• 2 cups organic spinach
• 1 banana
• 1.25 cups rice/almond/soy milk

Method

Add the ingredients (in the order listed) into your blender and blend that sucker for about thirty seconds (if you have a Magic Bullet!) to a minute.

Now, if you’re like me, you want to make the most out of this smoothie. When I made it this morning I used fresh spinach leaves, but after some research I discovered that blanching the spinach first allows the body to absorb more of the good stuff stored in the spinach! There are several ways to do this (stovetop, microwave) but I simply put all my spinach into a bowl and poured boiling water from my kettle onto it. I let it sit for about thirty to forty seconds, and then dumped the whole thing into a strainer.


Now, this is a lot more spinach than is needed for one green monster, but my plan was to freeze it for easy smoothie making in the mornings. After running the batch under ice cold water, I squeezed as much water as I could from the spinach and put it in a freezer bag and packed it away. If you’re not doing a batch, you can just put the spinach for one smoothie into a bowl with water and microwave it! (I also froze some bananas!)

All in all, I’d say it was a smoothalicious success! Tomorrow for breakfast is either strawberry or pumpkin, I can’t decide. Oh my. Choices, choices.