Banana – Sorghum Syrup – Almond Smoothie

Sorghum syrup from Rebecca's Garden in Columbia, Md.

Making a smoothie for me is honing the art of my intuitive voice. The smoothies I make develop as each ingredient “comes to me,” to speak in such language. Good smoothies are the ones where I listen to my intuitive voice. The horrible ones — and, mercy, I have had some of those — are the ones where I think my way to the result. So, without further ado (and, yes, I had to look up the spelling of “ado”), here is today’s smoothie –

Banana – Sorghum Syrup – Almond Smoothie

• 1/2 c soaked almonds and hazlenuts (couldn’t get my eyes off of them)
• 1 Tbsp sorghum syrup
• 1 banana
• A couple shakes of cinnamon
• A super-small pinch of nutmeg (because a little nutmeg goes a long way)
• A pinch of salt
• Ice, because the coldness of smoothies makes them more drink-like and less gloop-like
• Water, to spread the taste out over a larger area

I pureed the ingredients in my beloved Vitamix and … voilà: A banana – sorghum syrup – almond smoothie!

Here’s what I like about it: the sorghum syrup (which is really sweet) finds a landing place with the banana. (I find bananas rather bland and too banana-y. I don’t really like bananas except in smoothies.) The soaked almonds and hazelnuts add depth, richness and fat, as nuts do. The cinnamon is layered with the nutmeg for a slightly complex flavor that neither overpowers nor underwhelms. And the salt, of course, punches the flavors. It makes flavors a bit more sophisticated, I think. Overall, it’s somehow almost a milky flavor-texture without having any actual dairy ingredients.

Blueberry, Mulberry, Banana Smoothie

Mulberry

The vibe to make a smoothie occurred this morning. So I heeded it. This is what came about and got mixed together in my lovely, favorite-ist kitchen gizmo: the Vitamix –

Blueberry, Mulberry, Banana Smoothie

• 1 c frozen blueberries
• 1 banana
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• 2 T mulberry syrup (from a local Turkish grocer)
• 1 tsp agave syrup
• 2/3 c plain yogurt

Whirrr. Whirrr. Whirr. Yum.

Note: Mulberry syrup is a bit molasses-y and tastes faintly of raisins, to me. It needed something to mellow it, so I added the yogurt at the end.

Photo via thingsthatfizz.blogspot.com

Tofu banana strawberry smoothie

I wasn’t so sure this breakfast smoothie would turn out well. Mainly because two of my first three ingredients were sketchy. And even as I added more ingredients, I wasn’t sure if this was going to work. I started with –

• 

  Tofu banana strawberry smoothie

  1 banana (I’m not much of a banana lover)

• 5 frozen whole strawberries from the store (I’m partial to my hand-cut, sweated and frozen strawberries)
• 12 filberts, soaked

Then I was stuck. What next? No inspiration, had I. Yogurt? No yogurt to be had, so instead I added –

• 1/2 c of tofu (I’m a tofu-tolerator, not a tofu lover)
• 1/3 c of half and half (gotta have a liquid to make it blend well)

But that was bland. It need tang, flavor and depth. So I added –

• 2 honey tangerines, juiced
• A dash of salt
• A drop of vanilla

And that made it absolutely fantastic! Very smooth and creamy. Tasty in a gentle yet robust way. Yummy!

Blueberry and mango smoothie. Keeping it simple.

Blueberry mango smoothie.

The weather in the DC Metropolitan area yesterday was gorgeous! I celebrated that it was a Good Friday, indeed, with an annual tradition (chore) of digging out the compost pile. This is not a small project. Ever. But I get giddy and gleeful when I come across the hot zone for worms. I find it an inspiring vision, and it makes me happy. Spreading the rich composted earth about the garden is good for my soul. I’m a bit of a twit in that compost bin material only goes on food sources: vegetables and fruits, no flowers, trees or bushes.

But after hours in the sun and glorious weather, it was time for a smoothie break. I kept it simple, this is what I pureed in my Vitamix -

• 3 c frozen blueberries (I freeze them when they’re in season, fresh and on sale)
• 1 c frozen mango, sweated in citrus and sugar
• 1 c orange juice, from concentrate
• A little water

The result was colorful, tasty in a simple and delightful sort of way, and thick. Spoon thick. Gotta watch out for the brain freeze when it’s that thick. Yowsa. For future smoothies, I think it’s valuable to have fresh, not-frozen fruit as part of the mix. It keeps the temperature from being brain-freezing.

Overall, it was a nice drink and a nice break from the heavy lifting of moving dense, rich soil out of the compost pile. A few people were outside and also gardening, so I made enough to share with them, too.

I couldn’t leave well enough alone

Mercy. This is a #fail smoothie, and it’s all my fault. I was being experimental rather than intuitive. Big difference. So, I started out simple enough –

• 2 tangelos
• 1 mandarin orange, large
• 1.5 c of frozen blueberries
• 1 T of mystery ingredient (jalapeno jelly?)
• Salt

Straight up, I already knew I was in trouble because I knew I was putting too much salt in and I didn’t temper myself. Erg. It was OK, but, alas, too salty. Then I wanted to experiment, which, as I said, is a very different thing than following my intuition. I added about a cup of raw peanuts. And let me tell ya, peanuts are a powerful flavor not to be taken lightly. Anyway, I’ll eat it because it’s not horrid and I do like my smoothies, but I would not make this again, and I’ll be very attentive to how and where I add peanuts in future smoothies. Mercy!

Banana mango smoothie

After yesterday’s prune smoothie and the rather aghast comments I got over in Facebook, I guess my smoothie-intuition brought me back to a more centralized position. Today I blended in my Vitamix -

• 1 banana
• 1 c frozen mango (pre-sweated by me)
• 1 T cocoa nibs
• 1/3 c dried cherries
• 1 c pineapple juice, canned

Very nice! Smooth, tangy, sweet, easy to drink.

A most unsmooth smoothie

I gardened galore yesterday, soaking in the sun and strengthening my back, which apparently has been unamused by my sedentary leanings of late. Afterward, I was crazy hungry and needed some sustenance, and quickly. So, I conjured up a substantial smoothie, full of rich fats and depth. Here’s what I blended in my Vitamix –

• 1 c frozen strawberries (my kind, pre-sweated)
• 4-5 almonds, soaked
• 8-10 hazlenuts, soaked
• 2 T cocoa nibs
• 1/3 c coconut
• 1/2 c Greek-style yogurt, vanilla-flavored
• 1 c orange juice, from concentrate

When I opened the lid of my Vitamix blender, I saw a thick mixture inside. The cocoa, coconut and nuts don’t puree to a point of smoothness; they just get whipped into smaller bits. I decided to go with the spoon approach as the drink looked at the edge of “eatable.” I poured the unsmooth smoothie into two pretty dessert-type glasses, grabbed two spoons and served up a hearty, gritty, thick and tasty un-smoothie.

Prune smoothie

Prune smoothies. Whodathunkit?

I really do aim to make my smoothies from intuition. If I didn’t, I’d probably make the same handful of drinks again and again. Well, this morning, prunes popped onto my radar. Here’s what I blended in my Vitamix –

• 4 prunes
• 1 purple plum
• 1 cutie (like a clementine)
• 1 tsp mystery ingredient (some sort of hot jelly)
• 5-6 ice cubes

But that tasted flat, so I added –

• 1 small apple, gala and
• a dash of salt

It’s nice! I like it. Tangy, light but not too watery. No grit. Smooth.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS COLLINS/CORBIS

Mystery-ingredient smoothie

I tried to open the honey jar, but I couldn’t. So I grabbed the little jar, far in the back of the cupboard, that looked like it might be honey. I could open that one. Problem is, this little jar had no label on it, and I had no idea what it was. Best I can guess, it’s some sort of jalapeno jelly, but that’s a guess. The other problem is that I’d already had visions of a faux-smoothie, of lots of dessert-like things thrown into my Vitamix blender and called a smoothie because that sounds a lot more healthful than saying I just ate chocolate, coconut, nuts and yogurt.

Well, I decided to go with it, taking the information that I couldn’t get the honey jar open as a detour and moving toward the mystery item. Here’s what I blended –

• 1/2 c shredded coconut
• 1 T cocoa nibs
• 2 T mystery ingredient (possibly jalapeno jelly)
• 1 small apple, gala
• 1/2 c orange juice (from frozen concentrate)
• Dash of cinnamon
• Dash of vanilla
• Ice cubes, as no items used were frozen

It’s an interesting drink. Definitely an after-dinner smoothie, elegant, rich and only good when sipped slowly. In terms of color and visual appeal, it’s one of the worst I’ve ever made. It looks like I took one sheet of every degree of coarseness of sandpaper and blended it with corn starch to thicken it. It’s really horrible. The consistency is very un-smoothie-like and resembles more a potpourri of bits. (Hard cocoa nibs are hard; they get smaller in a Vitamix, but they’re still hard. And coconut has the same thing going on with its coarseness.)

Thank goodness I didn’t make a big batch. I’m still sipping it now. It’s really quite nice, despite the way it looks. And, as I do like to follow my intuition when I make smoothies (and in other situations as well), I think I got exactly what I wanted, which was a dessert to nibble on after my dinner. And this smoothie has lots of little bits to nibble on!

Smoothie season!

For all my adoration of smoothies, I just don’t dig ‘em much in the winter. The whole idea of eating, for example, strawberries in December is very off-putting to my seasonal sensibilities. But as the earth is warming up and the birds are sounding happier, thoughts of fruit smoothies run through my head. I had one the other night, a strawberry-yogurt. Nothing out of the ordinary. But this morning, I took that rather ordinary smoothie up a notch. Here’s what I blended in my Vitamix -

Strawberry Cutie

• 1 c frozen strawberries (these are my hand-frozen strawberries, “sweated” in a mix of sugar, lemon and citric acid then frozen)
• 2 T Greek-style vanilla yogurt
• 3 cuties (like clementines but better, imo)
• A dash of lemon concentrate
• … but the smoothie, while nice, didn’t have any depth at this point, so I added
• 1/2 c of raisins

Yum! The raisins added a sweetness and an ever-so-slight smidge of chewiness to the smoothie. Very nice. It’s all done and drunk up before I finished this blog post.

Mango Blueberry and Orange Vitamix Smoothie

I made a mango, blueberry and orange Vitamix smoothie last night. It was lovely. Easy to make. Easy to drink. Tasty. Nice consistency. Nothing extra added. I used –

• 1 mango
• 1 1/2 cup of frozen blueberries
• 2 oranges, juiced

Blended it all on super-high in Vitamix for about a minute, and drank it right up. Yum.

Sweet Potato and Apple Puree

It’s been months since I’ve blogged about smoothies. I don’t think my fruit intake isn’t that high, actually. Summer, yes. Lots. Fall, apples and pears. Winter: citrus and pomegranates and cranberries (are they a fruit) in season. So, while I don’t desire nightly fruit smoothies in the fall and winter, I do like to puree things in general. (That last statement might be worthy of psychological exploration. Hmm.) Anyhoo, I love my Vitamix, and I love to find real-food recipes that I can puree to bits and create a yummy dish. (Trust someone who’s been there: it’s quite possible to take something tasty, puree it, and end up with something very not-tasty.)

Here is one of my hands-down favorite purees: Sweet potatoe and apple. I’m bringing it to the thanksgiving holiday potluck at my j-o-b tomorrow, along with another more sugary sweet potato dish.

The ingredients include –

• sweet potatoes
• tart apples
• lime juice
• honey
• yogurt
• melted butter

The recipe I use is here. If you feel so called, enjoy. If you have a j-o-b where I have a j-o-b, perhaps you’ll sample a bit tomorrow.

Rock on.

 

Pic from http://www.foodnetwork.com/

A brain-freezing night cap

I ate a bag of potato chips today. Not the lunch-size bag. A bag. A b-a-g. And, not too surprisingly, I’ve been mighty thirsty the majority of this evening. I decided, not too surprisingly, to make myself the perfect smoothie. But what would that be to satisfy my chip-induced thirst?

Well, as I always do, I build my ingredients intuitively. I just watch what pops up in my mind as I go through the process. First, I saw strawberries. So, I traipsed to the mega-sized freezer to get out a bag of my specially prepared frozen strawberries (locally grown, cut, sugared and with a bit of ascorbic acid for flavor enhancing and preservation.). Then, when I opened the fridge, looking for the next ingredient, a half-empty bottle of Pinot Grigio sitting in the back of the fridge called out. I tasted the smoothie so far; it needed something sweet. Usually I add honey. But I saw white sugar, so I added sugar. (I go with the flow and the results are often quite stupendous.) So, here’s my super-simple strawberry-Pinot Grigio smoothie recipe.

• 1.5 c. frozen strawberries
• 3/4 c. Pinot Grigio
• 2 tsp sugar
• Li’l bit of water

This took all the power of my might Vitamix. And, as my Vitamix does, it performed fabulously. This smoothie was so perfect and right on the spot for what I wanted. The only thing I had to be careful of was to not drink it so fast as to get brain freeze!

Art by Pamela Gladding.

Kickin’ it with Kombucha

Kombucha. That was my stellar, push-it-over-the-top ingredient in today’s smoothie. Kombucha is slightly fermented drink with a bit of zing. Claims are high on its health benefits of the drink. I like it. While my blueberry-mango smoothie was coming along just fine, I felt it needed “something,” so I added the kombucha. Perfect! Here’s what I pureed in my Vitamix –

• 1.5 c. frozen blueberries
• 1.5 c. frozen mango
• 1 lemon, juiced
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• Li’l bit of water
• 8 oz of berry-flavored kombucha

I’ve been paying a bit more attention to the acid-alkaline range of my body’s chemistry, and my understanding is kombucha helps move the body toward a more basic chemistry.

Parsley & Mizuna Smoothie

Photo by Josh Bousel, via Flickr.

Do not try this at home. As a matter of fact: don’t try this one ever. While I managed to consume it for the experimental and nutritional value, I wouldn’t recommend a to-the-letter reproduction of this smoothie. Here’s what *not* to puree –

• 1 bunch parsley
• 1 doz chive stalks
• 2 cups mizuna leaves, wilted
• 3 garlic cloves, toasted
• 1/4 cup walnuts, toasted
• beef bouillon cube in 8 oz hot water

Maybe — and I mean maybe — in the hands of a trained chef, this could have become a dip or a topping for rice or something. Alas.

Cherry & Tabasco Smoothie

Tabasco and fruit. Better tasting than it may sound!

I fully expected this one to be a dud. A scary dud. To my surprise, it’s fabulous. Here’s what I pureed in my Vitamix –

• 1 cup, cherries, cut, sugared with citric acid and almost forgotten after 5 days of sitting in the fridge (yikes)
• 1 banana (bananas just scare me: they seem so non-banana-ish in the last 5-7 years … too much agribusiness and disease)
• 1 mango, ripe to the point of almost being uh-oh
• 1 tsp Tabasco sauce, the Louisiana kind (I knew I needed something hot, and that’s what caught my eye)
• 1/2 lime, juiced
• ice cubes

Amazing. The tabasco underneath it all (plus the lime) pulls these tastes and textures together in a way I wasn’t expecting. It’s rich, full, tasty. It even masks the scary agri-business banana flavor that keeps me from including bananas in most of my fruit smoothies.

I’ve used the word “scary” three times in one short blog post.

Scary.

TruBlood: Beet & Beef Puree

Beets puree well. They're a great smoothie ingredient.

Beets puree well. I know this from experience. And the summer beets are starting to pour into the markets, fresh and well-priced. So I gotz me a whole lot. Here’s the TruBlood Smoothie I made — and how:

• 6 small beets, boiled, peeled and marinated overnight in
• 1/2 cup fresh orange juice plus some
• olive oil

I toasted in olive oil –

• 3 cloves, garlic
• 1/3 c walnuts

Then added –

• 1.5 cup beef bouillon (totally cheated with 2 cubes of bouillon … for the salt)
• dash of pepper
• dash of red pepper flakes

On super-high in my Vitamix. Yum. The beef bouillon was a bit hot as I had boiled the water to make the broth. So the heat balanced the other temperatures and made the drink tepid — almost blood-like … The roasted walnuts deepen the flavor of this drink and make it much more than beets and cheap bouillon. The color is spectacular: a purplish-pinkish-red. And there’s just enough kick with the hot peppers, pepper and garlic.

Lettuce & Pumpkin Seed Smoothie

Try adding pumpkin seeds to layer in a bit of bitter and depth to your next smoothie.

High off my success last night with my lettuce and pinot grigio smoothie, I boldly went where no human has gone before. This is what I made — and how –

• 1/2 head of green oak leaf lettuce
• 3 sprigs of flat leaf parsley
• 5 sprigs of chives
• 1 lemon, juiced
• 2 T, walnuts
• 1 T, salted pumpkin seeds
• ice cubes

This combo didn’t taste so great. My mind said, “light, fruit.”So I added,

• 1 orange, juiced

But then it was too light, so I added,

• 1 cucumber, the little kind

But that was too bitter, so I added,

• Salt

And that made it perfect. This is an excellent Vitamix lettuce smoothie. The layers of flavor are incredible, complex and in relationship to each other in surprising ways. The orange and lemon add the sour, with the orange making it light and just a bit sweet. The nuts bring in the deeper, bitter flavors. The herbs chime in, but not too loudly. The color of this drink is a pretty, light green and the texture is smooth, light and easy in the mouth.

Lettuce & Pinot Grigio Smoothie

Try a little pinot grigio with your next lettuce smoothie.

“Surprisingly delightful,” is the response I got to this smoothie. Long story short. Short story long. But I needed to eat something quickly before meeting a friend for drinks last night. “A smoothie. I’ll make a lettuce smoothie,” I thought.

Here’s what I used –

• 4-5 leaves of green oak leaf lettuce
• 3 big sprigs of flat leaf parsley, from the garden, natch
• 2 small lemons, juiced
• ice cubes

But the result was kind of pulpy in a way-too-lettuce-y texture and it didn’t taste so great. So I added –

• 1 T, Olive oil
• 2 T, walnuts
• 2 T, currants
• A splash of pinot grigio

And that created a “surprisingly delightful” drink. I quickly drank one glass, but the volume of the smoothie I’d just made was huge. I poured the rest into two glass bottles and carted them off to the bar, where the green drinks proceeded to get curious stares and questions from people. A few were willing to try it and confirmed what I felt as well.

This is a nice drink: genuinely — and surprisingly — delightful.

Darn good wild raspberry smoothie

Our household was gifted with gobs of wild raspberries. Which we promptly froze for smoothies. This afternoon was my first attempt at using them, so I went light and mild for trial one.

Wild raspberry and tea smoothie

• 1.5 c frozen wild raspberries
• 1 c of sun tea (black tea and fresh mint)
• 1 T of honey

Wild raspberries

The result was a refreshing drink, but not much of a smoothie, per se. The wild raspberries just aren’t richly pulpy. Though they are richly seedy.  So, knowing the fruit didn’t add too much flavor or pulp, I headed on to make smoothie #2.

Darn good wild raspberry smoothie

• 1.5 c frozen wild raspberries
• 2 oranges, juiced
• 1/2 c  yogurt, plain
• 1 T cocoa nibs (NIBS — as in bits o beans)
• Dash of cinnamon
• Dash of vanilla

Vitamix, natch. On high, high, high to pulverize the many seeds in the raspberries. OMG. This is one of the wilder and better smoothies I’ve made … and I’ve made a lot of smoothies. This is one darn good smoothie! The sour flavor from the berries, orange juice and yogurt are balanced by the sweetness of the honey and a bit from the berries. The chocolate/cocoa adds some bitterness and depth. The vanilla and cinnamon connect the flavors and add some gentle sophistication to the drink.