Missy Diggs

Okay, so you guys want recipes and all like that. Which makes sense, because it’s hard to take that crazy leap of faith and start cramming a bunch of green leaves into your blender when you are so excited about the otherwise fruity and delicious drink you are about to enjoy.

I don’t really use recipes.

But I do read them for inspiration, and I have also found some resources that have given me a fair amount of guidance about how to do this crazy thing of drinking my greens.

Be warned: many of the people who are inspired enough by the greatness of green smoothies to want to shout it from the Internet rooftops are a little…. well…. enthusiastic is a nice word…. totally wacked out is also fun to say. You’ve probably had some encounters with True Believers before. They’re delightful and informative, as I’m sure you know, and sometimes they can be wildly emphatic and dogmatic. It’s okay, though; it’s just vegetables. Lovely green and organic vegetables. (Though some True Believers claim –and I agree with them actually– that leafy greens should get their very own food group and not be considered vegetables at all. )

The first book I read that really turned me on to the green smoothie situation was Green for Life by Victoria Boutenko. She has another book that I haven’t read yet called Green Smoothie Revolution: The Radical Leap Toward Natural Health. She is a raw foodist, and she and her family are not fooling around! They don’t just buy some bag of triple-washed spinach and stick a few leaves in with their bananas and berries: Oh No! They go tramping around in the woods looking for wild edibles, and there are videos on YouTube of her son Sergei doing just that. Anyway, if you do any reading about green smoothies you will definitely run across Victoria and Sergei. Green for Life has some smoothie recipes and is also just a great read if you are wanting to get fired up about going green.

I really like the greensmoothie.com web site too. It is wacky and has all kinds of crazy highlighting and outrageous health claims (which may very well all be true; what do I know?) but it also has good basic information about how to blend fruit and greens together to get a good smoothie. Here’s their basic recipe (note the highlighted title; they love highlighting over there at greensmoothie.com):

Basic Green Smoothie Recipe:

• 2-3 sweet fruits, e.g. apple or pear – blend first to form a tasty base,
• 1 vegetable fruit or a celery stalk – add next for extra minerals, e.g. summer squash or zucchini,
• One tray of organic baby greens like sunflower or salad mix from my Sprouter, or one packet of pre-washed organic greens, or a handful of farm greens or wild edibles.

And here are the week’s worth of green smoothies I posted on Facebook recently. Like I said, I don’t really measure quantities or use recipes per se, but I usually like the results pretty well. And if I don’t like it, I just drink it anyway and make a yummier smoothie the next day.

• Tuesday’s green smoothie: flax seeds, collard greens, frozen cherries, and coconut water. Yum? well, it tastes healthy, for sure. And the rats…. they love it.
• Wednesday’s green smoothie: flax seeds, honeydew melon, coconut water, arugula, frozen peaches. Tastes like spring! nom nom nom
• Thursday’s green smoothie: grapefruit, celery, Asian pear, amba hardar (mango ginger, from the Indian grocer), arugula, coconut water. Sweet and grassy! Hardcore and delicious!
• Friday’s green smoothie: flax seeds, cacao pods, banana, apple, dandelion greens, frozen strawberries. Color: scary dark olive green (scary? or sophisticated?). Mostly tastes like banana but has a seriously bitter afterbite. Not for sissies. Me, I’ll drink anything if it’s been run through the blender with a banana, so I’m okay.
• Saturday’s green smoothie: flax seeds, raw cacao powder, cinnamon, banana, frozen strawberries, almond milk, spring mix. OMG y’all this is GOOD! It has a very rich dark chocolate color and a perfectly sweet choco taste. This week’s winner!
• Sunday’s green smoothie: almonds, cacao pods, flax seeds, dates, oranges, romaine lettuce, almond milk, cinnamon. I wish it were colder, but it’s delicious! Very creamy and exotic. Lovely green color. If I want to drink any more of it, I will have to chase away Miss Kattie Rat: she is dipping her paws in and scooping up great handfuls.
• Monday’s green smoothie: honeydew, avocado, matcha (green tea powder), dulse (seaweed), coconut water, romaine. Speckled and refreshing. Tastes a bit like cold California roll soup, if there were such a thing. At first I thought it needed something sweet and crisp, like fresh mint, but now I am grooving on it.

My green smoothies are not always green. Sometimes they are red, sometimes they are brown, and sometimes they are the hideous green color that lies in the totally unappetizing range between red and brown.  For me, a nice color can be a nice benefit, but I haven’t found a real correlation between taste and color or anything like that.

Also! a lot of these green smoothie Internet people love to go on and on about two big lies:

1. you can put certain greens in a smoothie without affecting the taste at all, and
2. if you use those certain greens, your kid will drink a whole green smoothie and beg for more

I can taste pretty much every type of green I’ve tried. Probably the least conspicuous taste is baby spinach, which probably means that’s a good one to start with if you’ve never done green smoothies before. It also means you can put a whole bunch of spinach in there before it really affects the taste much. I read one web site that claimed green cabbage would be undetectable in a fruit smoothie and so I mixed up a big batch of strawberry cabbage delight and I will tell you now that the cabbage was totally detected. (I think it was the horrible taste of wet farts that gave it away.) And I don’t know about your child, but my child does not like to be in the same room with a green smoothie, and she has never consented to actually taste one. She doesn’t actually care much for fruit smoothies either, as a rule, so maybe that has something to do with it, but I am guessing that she is not the only kid who isn’t going to be eating two pounds of greens a day any time in this decade.

I have made a lot of smoothies with spinach, either raw (I buy the big bags of triple-washed spinach at Costco) or frozen. I also love to use arugula, because I love love love arugula. I love it so much I would like to write a waltz for it and dance it around the room. I also buy from Costco those big plastic bins of prewashed organic salad mix and I grab great handfuls of it and shove it down into the blender. Beyond that I have also tried collard greens (fresh or frozen), frozen mustard greens, cress, sprouts, dandelion greens, parsley, cilantro, kale, chard, romaine, and various other lettuces. I always have big bags of frozen berries and fruit from Costco and I use whatever fresh fruit or melons we have sitting around as well. Bananas and avocados make things very creamy. To my surprise, cucumber seems to make things creamy as well. I often put in flax seed, cacao pods or powder, cinnamon, or turmeric. Sometimes I throw in some nuts, or sesame seeds, or tahini, or nut butter. I use nut milk, soy milk, water, coconut water, or juice. If I want it sweet, I’ll use dates or agave nectar or honey or molasses or xylitol. Our ice tastes funny to me so unless I use frozen fruit or frozen greens my smoothies tend to be a bit warmish and that’s not always good. If that happens I’ll usually stick it in the fridge and go take a shower or something.

I like posting about my smoothies and sharing recipes because that keeps me inspired and trying new things. Otherwise I get in a rut and the next thing you know I’ve eaten Cheerios for breakfast three days in a row. So, here’s my challenge/request to you. If you read this, and you make a green smoothie, post a comment telling what you put in it and how it was. And that’ll keep me going for awhile and give me time to figure out what I’m going to blog about next, and we’ll see how many posts I end up with this quarter, thanks to the power of green smoothies.

Lately I have been telling everyone on Facebook what I put in my green smoothies everyday. And the funny thing is that I have been getting a lot of comments and questions, and it seems like instead of being freaked out by the whole concept of green smoothies, a bunch of people are actually thinking something like, “Hey, that sounds like something I should get into.”

And so I thought it would be a good topic for a blog post, especially since it does seem to be about time for my quarterly update. (jeesh, where does the time go? well, that’s a whole ‘nother blog post for sure. Look for it in June or so.)

I have always liked greens. My dad grew up in Arkansas and so my sweet midwestern mother would valiantly try to recreate the meals he loved and remembered, with varying levels of success. Liver and onions, with the liver cooked until it is chewy and tastes like the tongue of a shoe soaked in blood: ewww, yuck. Stewed tomatoes and okra, with the okra so slimy that it is almost impossible to spoon out just one serving from the bowl: no, thank you. A mess of greens, cooked with bacon until the fat turns green and the greens are nearly vapor: yes, please, and I’ll eat my sister’s serving as well.

I have also always felt that every truly good day contains a salad. I had a friend whose family liked to tease their mother about how she could not eat a dinner that didn’t begin with a green salad, no matter where she was or who was paying. They bought her a t-shirt that said “Veni, Vidi, Veggie: I came, I saw, I had a salad.” As a salad lover myself, I wanted one of those shirts and I was sure that EVERYONE would want one. Obviously this was the next great t-shirt, the “I’m with stupid” of the 90s. Strangely, I’ve never seen another one. I guess they didn’t really catch on.

But even though I willingly ate greens (and sopped up the pot liquor with my cornbread) and loved salads, I still needed to be clued in to just how much I liked the green leafy stuff. The next clue came from a woman I met in a series of self-realization type seminars I did. One of the things we were working on at some point was figuring out how to care for ourselves so we could get out there and do all the unreasonable and powerful things we were supposed to be doing all the time. This woman said that she felt best when she ate greens at every meal. At every meal, y’all! My first reaction was, that’s weird. My second reaction, right on its heels, was How would you even know that? and my third reaction, the one that stuck, was I bet I’d feel better if I ate greens at every meal too. It has taken me years to even get close to managing anything like that. (There is one other thing that has stuck with me about this woman, and so I have to share it here because I probably won’t have any reason to bring her up again: she said the word “donkey” as if it rhymed with “monkey.” Seriously, isn’t that odd?)

Finally, what happened is that after my cancer treatments were pretty much finished I started wanting to eat the healthiest diet I possibly could. And I read lots of books that seemed at first to take a lot of the joy out of life. And some of these books are pretty fringey and weird, and some of them are pretty mainstream and well-researched, and a lot of them say the same thing. And one thing they say is that green leafy vegetables are the key to health. And this is not just in the yeah yeah yeah I know eat more vegetables way: some of these people advocate eating TWO POUNDS of green leafy vegetables EVERY DAY. And,  basically, because there is no way to really do that if you have to actually chew every bite, green smoothies are the way to go.

But then it turns out that green smoothies have their own benefits, aside from just making it even remotely possible to eat the amount of greens recommended. For one thing, when you blend the hell out of your greens, you take out some of the work of digestion. This is a boon for people who have difficulty digesting vegetables (many cancer patients fall into this category), people who have trouble chewing or eating large quantities of food (hello, cancer?), and people who simply want to absorb as much nutrition as possible from every ounce of their food.

When it comes to nutrition per ounce, greens are the hands-down winner. They have crazy high nutrient density, which basically means that 100 calories worth of green leafies has more nutrition than 100 calories worth of anything else. It is also a relatively large serving size of food so it’s filling and it can be a lot of work to eat. However, stick that stuff in a high-powered blender, sweeten it with fruit, and stick a straw in it, and you can slurp up more nutrients for breakfast than most people eat in a week.

I started making a green smoothie for breakfast almost every day. It was hard at first, partly because I burned out my trusty old Oster blender in the first week. Also because it is hard to figure out how much produce to buy, how to keep it all fresh, and what combinations will taste good. Luckily for me, the taste is not a huge issue because it turns out that I will drink almost anything that you can pour out of a blender and suck through a straw. And there are lots and lots of recipes available, both on line and in books. And, though I still can’t afford a Vita Mix, the rock star blender for the green smoothie lifestyle, I bought a Breville with a glass pitcher and have learned to live with it. (Many green smoothie lovers also advocate the Blendtec but I don’t like it because the pitcher contains dangerous plastics, and the website has a bunch of research claiming to prove that dangerous plastics are safe. I just hate that.)

Here’s the question everybody asks, and that I don’t know for sure how to answer: what benefits have I experienced from drinking green smoothies?

The first benefits were unexpected and totally clear: by the third day of green smoothies, my chapped lips were smooth and soft, and my fingernails seemed stronger. Soon after that I experienced a welcome change in bathroom habits. The other benefits are harder to define and explain, but I believe that drinking green smoothies is the single best thing I am doing for my health, and I would never want to give it up.

Here are some things I have noticed, that I think come from the greens:

• I don’t crave sweets anymore.
• I don’t experience blood sugar crashes like I always did before. If I get hungry, it’s not a crisis. I can wait a while to eat and hunger has become a pleasant sensation.
• I sleep better, and fall asleep more easily at a reasonable time.
• My teeth feel cleaner, my breath is fresher, and my sweat smells clean.
• My mood is more stable.
• I have a much greater sense of well-being.

In some ways, it’s vague. In other ways, it’s totally clear to me. I love the clean and  bitter taste of greens, I love knowing that I have had half my veggies for the day before 9 am, and I love thinking of all the precious nutrients being released from their cell walls and ready to enter my blood stream through my fancy hand-blown glass straw. It’s better than chemotherapy, I’ll tell you that! It’s virtue in a glass.

And the rats, the lovely pet rats, they really do love the green smoothies. And that gives me a good feeling, too, because I remember some study about how rats wouldn’t eat white flour, and I like to think they are attracted to what is good. It’s also just so cute to watch them pull themselves up on the edge of the glass and take a sip!