Yes, I made my first green smoothie this evening, and it was really good. I actually would have done this a few days ago, but the bananas needed time to ripen, since I got them literally straight out of the box at the grocery store.
But regardless, I have had one, and I enjoyed it. In making this smoothie, I first added ice and some water. Then I jammed a whole bunch of spinach in, like filling half the blender jar with spinach. Then in the remaining space, I put in some grapes, and then peeled and broke up a banana. And when I was finished jamming everything in there, the blender looked like this:
Very layered. From bottom to top, you have ice and water, then the spinach, then a thin layer of grapes, and finally the banana.
Blending this concoction was a bit of a challenge. It was challenging because of the way I layered it. Ice on bottom is a bad idea. Likewise, I really jammed a lot of spinach in there, and that became a problem as well. The issue was that once I started up the blender, the ice at the bottom blended up, and that was it. The spinach basically stayed where it was, suspended higher up in the jar. I rocked the blender to try and persuade the spinach to fall, but to no avail. Then I turned off the blender. I held the jar in one hand, and held the lid on tight, turned the jar on its side, and swirled it around. Then I put the jar back on the rest of the blender, and gave it a spin. No. Still wasn’t blending properly. So lastly, I popped the little center part of the lid out, and, not having a proper thing to jam into the blender through that hole, I used the back of a large kitchen spoon. That seemed to do it. Once the spinach and such got going, it quickly became a proper smoothie, and was very green. Take a look:
And this is what it looked like inside the jar:
And then it went from jar to glass:
As soon as I took that picture, it reminded me of the Queen from the Disney version of Snow White, where she holds up the glass and we see her reflection, and she says, “Now, begin my magic spell!”
But all in all, I liked it. Kind of surprisingly, it tasted like bananas. I couldn’t taste the grapes at all, nor the spinach. I did, however, enjoy the texture of the spinach. That was fun. And with this being all raw fruits and vegetables, you don’t lose any of the nutritive value of any of it. And my doctor will be delighted to see this. No added sugar, no strange additives, and most of it is dark, leafy green vegetables. Oh, and the spinach was organic, too. You can get a big container of organic spinach at Giant for a really good price.
And how well did I like it? Well, it didn’t take long to transform it into this:
Yeah, that was a good smoothie. I don’t particularly like salads, so whatever gets the raw vegetables into my system is a good thing. Thing is, if I’m going to keep this up, I need to get a better blender. Mine cost less than $20 at Walmart back in 2004 or so, and I think I got what I paid for there. Basically, you pay for a crummy blender, and you get a crummy blender.