Smoothies

This morning i ran to the grocery store for a few things and found a bag of pepino melons. normally $5 per melon (seriously. and these aren't even as big as a mango!), i found a bag of 5 good-looking beauties for a dollar. not one to walk away from a good deal, i thought i'd use this opportunity to try a melon i had always wanted to eat but never had.

refreshing like a watermelon, slightly perfumed like a cantaloupe, and with surprising richness like a papaya, these mild fruits have a great yield and look adorable sitting on the counter (they're a soft egg yolk-yellow with dark purple streaks and look like a cosmic mistake). They're also not a front-line fruit; they lack any kind of punch or distinct flavor that would make them a fruit that... well, a fruit that you had actually heard of. so i just thought i'd send them to the background to heighten a fruit salad or... oh wait! we drink smoothies now. perfect.



You know the commercials or movies where a guy comes in from his morning jog, then opens his stainless steel refrigerator and returns with perfectly ripe, fake-looking fruit, and just 'whizzes up' a smoothie? and that's breakfast? with no buttery bread in the conversation, no eggs with syrup? just... fresh fruit?

i'm sorry, but that just doesn't work for me. i need a proper breakfast. if i were searching for an excuse, i'd blame my quasi-English upbringing, and by that i mean i was raised in the same vicinity as a few 2nd generation English offspring. i need eggs. (turkey) bacon. and most importantly, 1/2 a day's worth of carbs. potatoes preferably, but i won't scoff at a toasted english muffin. maybe some grits could join us.

so, in my opinion, breakfast is way more important to get right than lunch. i've eaten many a crappy lunch sandwich happily. more often, i'm eating leftovers across all points of the 'tasty' spectrum every day. lunch, to me, is sort of an afterthought, consisting of whatever you can scrounge up and eaten in however many seconds or minutes you have to spare. but breakfast? oh, dear. if you mess my breakfast up i'm about ready to cut you.

which is why i know with full certainty that i will never be the guy, fresh from a morning run, whizzing up a smoothie and calling it breakfast. but. BUT. i think i could be halfway.

in the past month we've been doing a lot of celebratory eating. imbibing, too (let's not kid each other), and all of excesses made me realize, two days before my sister-in-law's wedding, that i needed to get my food life in order. so, in similar fashion to how i react to many things, i started making lists. writing down everything i've eaten in an attempt to shame myself into eating better and get back on track. and it worked (it always does), but it also made me realize that even though i feel we eat well 80% of the time (the past few weeks completely falling in the 20% category), i honestly thought we were better with fruit. i love fruit, and just assumed we got enough on a daily basis. not so, said my carefully written lists. not so at all.

so here was the inspiration behind our now-daily smoothies. by no (NO) means is this a breakfast replacement. i see this as more of a breakfast mini appetizer. and, i can say, an amazing way to wake up. so thirst-quenching, nothing too sweet, and nice fiber and refreshing bits of things that are good for you. it's a little 'you're welcome, body' taste before i proceed to deliver a punch of calories and protein.

and let me just say that making daily smoothies without buying a frozen mix is so damn easy. maybe once a month or every few weeks i'll make a sort of batch, which is to say i cut fruit, lay them out on a rack and leave to freeze for 3 hours. maybe an hour of peeling and cutting for a month or so of smoothies. and then just a minute or two in the morning assembling and blending. to me, that kind of time required in exchange for getting a bunch of my fruit requirements per day and extra protein, antioxidants, and fiber is worth it. can you tell i'm trying to hard-sell this concept? and you can add as many other things as you want to: flax seed, those little acai berry smoothie packs (have you seen those bags of individually-wrapped 1 oz portions in the freezer section?), and my favorite, a teaspoon of granulated soluble fibre (benefiber).


almost of the things that you are told to eat and that will save your life and make you live to a thousand years can be put into a smoothie and can be consumed very happily. no punishment required.

so this is what i do:

about once a month, i go to the store and get the old, ripe bananas that are dirt cheap and shrouded in shame in the form of a white paper bag and bright manager's special sticker. so long as they just have a couple of spots on them, they're cool. anything more funky and just get the regular ones. you want ripe bananas, not welfare bananas.

then i usually get a box of cuties (in canada they're the christmas mandarins, but sometimes in the summer they have something similar) and spend a small part of a lazy weekend afternoon peeling and separating the orange segments, then arranging (cutely) on a rack and then freezing. i recommend a law&order marathon weekend, but it's not mandatory.


[peeling and segmenting the orange is the longest step, and if you want to skip it or your oranges are awful, feel completely free to use orange juice as a liquid and be done with it. no judgment from this side, just cut & freeze whatever you like to replace.]

then you can get a tub of plain or vanilla (check the sugar content) yogurt and wait around until a fruit you like is in season and then is fresh and cheap, then cut it up and freeze it too. which is why, after tasting the melon today, i found myself compelled to tell you about the smoothies. go make smoothies!

for liquids i use a big dollop of yogurt, some coconut milk (i love that it's light, flavorful, and the cartons are shelf-stable so you never are without) or regular milk, and sometime a spash of whatever fruit juice we have on hand.




also, it should be mentioned, that the Magic Bullet is the best invention ever. When Andy lived up in Canada with my roommates and i, his birthday came a few days before he left to California again. So I booked a hotel room with an on-site spa for extra relaxation, and got a suite so we could have a room dedicated to snacks and chilling wine. it was supposed to be a romantic interlude before he left (did i mention i lived with 5 other people at the time?). My girl Jacquie was off work that day, and offered to help distract him with lunch and drinks while i ran to the italian centre and got the good snacks. the imported salami, the smoked salmon and spread, the melt-in-your-mouth smoked gouda slices. then jacquie drove him to our pick-up location, and i got so excited about other people appreciating our snacks, i invited her up for an hour for some wine and food. what began as a romantic escape quickly devolved into shoving our faces full of food and watching a will ferrell movie on their pay per view (not a euphemism, jerks). after the movie cut and the credits ran, the tv cut to a Magic Bullet infomercial.

friends, it was all over from there. it really was. for 2 hours we watched demonstrations about how amazing this product was. instant salsa? 10 second alfredo? blueberry smoothies??? all amazing. about a half hour in we couldn't find out how to turn on the AC and called downstairs. a guy came up to fix it and he, too, stood transfixed. of course, this was in 2004 and way before facebook (i think?) and twitter and this product being sold at Bed, Bath and Beyond and Macys. this was the Magic Bullet's inception. Three years later, i was still talking about the Magic Bullet and Claire, an old roomie, bought us one off of some random As Seen on TV website for our wedding. now, i'm not going to say i pulled it out all the time. mostly to make small batches of ground almonds for indian dishes, or as a spice blender for rubs and marinades. but i can't say i used it more than once a month, until the smoothies. now i thank claire almost every day, out loud like a woman unbalanced, for our amazing Magic Bullet. it even has lids! so you can make three or four smoothies at a time and put lids on them, then keep them in the fridge and add the frozen fruit and ice the morning of. the cup portions are perfect, and it blends frozen stuff amazingly. the future is here.