Last week a friend of mine suggested we try a green smoothie challenge she found online. You can sign up for free, every week you get sent an email with 5 new green smoothie recipes and a shopping list. The smoothies aren’t meant to be meal replacements, although you can add things to them to make them more substantial if you want them to be. The smoothies aren’t meant to be part of a cleanse or weight loss gimmick or anything like that. The point of the smoothie is to get more veggies and fruit in to your body in a healthy and tasty way.
I like 30 day challenges, I don’t know why but I do lol 🙂 I especially like 30 day challenges that don’t cost me money so I signed up!
We came in to the challenge late so we won’t get all the recipes which initially I thought was too bad; since I’ve received two weeks of recipes I don’t feel so bad about this anymore.
These smoothie recipes are not all that great. Between the two of us we’ve tried 4 recipes (I think) and none of them have impressed us. For liquid they use a lot of water, or coconut water, which means the smoothie turns out liquidy not thick, plus, some of the ingredient combos result in really bland smoothies. It’s not like I was expecting the most amazing tasting smoothies in the world or anything but I’ve come up with better tasting smoothies on my own which is fairly pathetic when you think about my lack of ability in the kitchen lol 😛
One thing most of the recipes have in common is the ratio of fruit to veggie to liquid. Most of the recipes favour a 3:2:2 ratio. For example, one of the recipes has:
2 cups fresh spinach
2 cups water
2 cups cherries, pitted
1 banana
Now just swap out the spinach for kale and the cherries for a different fruit and you’ve basically got another of their recipes. In case the ratio thing isn’t clear, there are 3 cups fruit, 2 cups veggie, 2 cups liquid…yes I am counting the banana as a cup because it makes my life easier to do so lol
So yeah, it’s not going great in the enjoyment-of-smoothie part of the challenge but it is going great in the I’ve-had-a-smoothie-every-day-since-we-started part of the challenge.
Both of us have decided to not follow the supplied recipes any longer. We got our second week of recipes on Thursday and ugh, they do not look good. One thing I learned from one of the recipes I tried from the first batch of recipes we received was I very much do not like oranges in my smoothies. I hate pulp. Pulp is oh so gross. The recipe had 2 oranges in it. I didn’t think much of it, figured the blender would smooth out the pulp but nope, it didn’t. With every mouthful of smoothie I was pulling pulp out of my mouth, ugh, how do people stand that stuff?? Blech! The only ok part with that smoothie was it used almond milk so it wasn’t as liquidy as some of the other recipes. Pulp combined with a runny smoothie might have been too much to handle *shakes head*. 😉
Something I do like about the recipes are the size. They purposefully make the recipes large enough you are making two servings of smoothie. On the website they say they do that so you can “share the smoothie love”, basically they are trying to get you to convert other people to the way of the smoothie but if you want you can just put one portion in an air tight container and store it in the fridge for the next day, which is exactly what I have been doing. So far I am loving that part most of all! Two smoothies out of one smoothie making session, nothing a lazy person likes better than a two for one lol
Of the recipes I have tried I have yet to see an actual green smoothie. I followed the recipes as they are written and this is the colour of my first green smoothie…
In case you can’t tell on your monitor the smoothie is purple. Purple! Not green. It has 2 cups of kale in it which you can’t tell from looking at it. It also has 2 oranges, one cup of blueberries, 2 bananas and 1 cup almond milk. It has a sickeningly sweet taste to it due to the oranges (I think) and lots of pulp. Never again will this smoothie be made by me, nuh-uh.
I am going to stick with the challenge, just tweak it a bit so it isn’t disgusting lol. I will use the same ratio of fruit to veggie to liquid but I will use combinations of fruit and veggie and liquid that I choose, not some random recipe some person I’ve never met says is good.
I’m treating the smoothies like the meals I have been trying to make, following guidelines that have been explained to me so I know what I am making is healthy but experimenting with flavours so I find enjoyment in what I create and eat. Hopefully it works! 🙂
The Amazing Shrinking Woman 