Green smoothies

I just tried my hand at making green smoothies (smoothies with green veg in them). I had read about these lots, how wonderfully nutritious and actually palatable they are. We were pleasantly surprised. I cheated a little on the first one (meaning I sweetened it some), but the second time around---no sugar added. This is what I did:

first smoothie:
a little more than 1 cup orange juice (100% juice)
3 big handfuls of spinach
(blend this first)
strawberries, frozen then thawed a little, , a huge handful???
1 mango, cut up
3 TBS sugar
blend all and drink up, it was really delicious

second smoothie:
a little less than 1 cup orange juice
3 big handfuls of spinach (probably 3-4 small salads' worth)
watermelon, a regular size bowl full ???? slightly frozen
1 mango, cut up, chilled
NO EXTRA SUGAR!!!
This was not as good as the first, but still quite good.

Drinking a salad, so gooood! give it a try. Sophia doesn't really like it, I think it may be the texture, we will keep trying.

I will paste here all about green smoothies from the website passionatehomemaking.com, and here is the link to the same post on green smoothies, I paste just for your convenience. Obviously I made some changes, I think I used mostly spinach, or maybe 50greens/50 fruit. I also chose the juice as my liquid, the coconut milk here is super sweet, but I will try it sometime. I just used what I had so I definitely could work with it and make it even more nutrient rich. But wow! they are yummy!

More than you wanted to know about green smoothies:
(again, this is not from me)

Did you know that through one green smoothie you can con­sume 5-8 serv­ings of fruits and veg­eta­bles? Did you also know that eating green smooth­ies is one of the eas­i­est way to digest the full nutri­ents of fruits and vegetables?

Green smooth­ies are a won­der­ful alter­na­tive, as apposed to juices, of absorb­ing the full potential by retain­ing the entire whole form of the fruit/vegetable, thus receiv­ing all the fiber. They can assist in boost­ing energy, build­ing your immune system, detox­ing impu­ri­ties, and loos­ing weight. Greens are rich in mag­ne­sium and alka­line min­er­als like cal­cium and are superb in their Omega-3 unsat­u­rated fat con­tent. Believe it or not, greens are one of the rich­est sources of protein.

The best com­bi­na­tion is a bal­ance of 40% greens to 60% fruits. Keep the greens varied as well. Spinach is our favorite, in addi­tion to kale. Other options include: celery, chard, romaine, alfalfa, pars­ley, beet greens, and col­lard greens.

I have found you can make a green smoothie out of pretty much any fruit and greens combination!

Here is how I start. Combine:

I have found it eas­i­est with a tra­di­tional blender to com­bine the greens first in order to get them real smooth. This would not be nec­es­sary with a Vita-​Mix, but with a stan­dard blender com­bin­ing all the ingre­di­ents at once usu­ally leaves you with green clumps.

1 1/2 cups of liq­uids (I usu­ally use a com­bi­na­tion of water, coconut milk, and kefir)

3 oz or more fresh greens, which is approx­i­mately half a bag or 3 large hand­fuls (spinach or kale are best!) -start with smaller quan­ti­ties and work you way up!

2-3 Tbsp orange juice con­cen­trate, optional (this is a more frugal alter­na­tive than using pre-​mixed juices - it stretches the juice further)

After these ingre­di­ents are thor­oughly blended, you can add an assort­ment of fruit.

Here are our favorite additions:

1/2-1 cup Frozen straw­ber­ries or rasp­ber­ries

1 Banana

1/2 cup Frozen Blue­ber­ries

1/4 cup Frozen Pineap­ple

2-3 Frozen Peach slices

I have also used canned pears on occa­sion as well.

Blend and add a little stevia or honey to sweeten and any addi­tional boosters.

Addi­tional boosters:

Ground flax seeds

Ground pump­kin seeds

Coconut oil

Back in action

It was a good week off from blogging (and reading blogs), able to rest, reflect, renew my heart towards deeper things, very refreshing.

Sophia was quite an entertainer this week, and David asked me one day: "is she this cute all day long?" yes, pretty much. Except when she is throwing a fit or refusing to eat her food, of course. Her Chinese is greatly improving, amazing me everyday. By next month it will be better than ours (joke, but give her a year and then I am serious). She wakes up in the mornings saying (in Chinese: xiao niao xiao niao, fei, fei, fei 'birdies, birdies, fly, fly, fly' (she wants me to pick her up to look out her window to see the birds), then she will start saying the word for pigeon/dove, which we sometimes see and I actually learned through her . If I tell her there are no birds (mei you le), she says 'fly away' (feizou, fei zoule)or 'went home' (hui jiale) in Chinese. There are tons more things she can say, but I won't bore you...hiring her teacher at this stage was one of the best things we have done!

In English, she has started her negotiating skills, yes, at less than 22 months. I try to prepare for things we are 'about to do' especially if it may be something she doesn't like, like go inside, or change her diaper. I know she has no real concept of length of time, but she does understand that 'in two minutes (meaning soon)' it is time to go in, or we will eat your snack, etc. One day, a few weeks ago, as she was in the middle of drawing, I told her: 'okay Sophia come to your highchair, it is time to eat lunch.' Her reply? "two minutes." (meaning, not now mom) I chuckled quite hard, she didn't want to stop what she was doing. How do I tell her only Mommy or Daddy can say that! Yes, she thinks she rules the roost, but we are working on that. And when her little sis comes, whoa, big changes for her little world.


what is so great about this picture, besides that she is wearing my sun hat, is that she is drinking milk! She drank that whole carton! If you recall, she loved loved loved milk in a bottle, refused milk in a cup. I would try for a while and quit. She has drunk out of these cartons with a straw before but not for very long. But she just sat there and drank half of it, then later drank the other half....we will see if she does this two days in a row.




whoa, those curls, all in the face...

we loved the way she cocked her head to look up at daddy through her hair...had to do a camera grab.

signing off for the week

Yes, I am not going to blog/internet this week....we will see you next week.
Blessings until then.

Rainy Saturday Activity

Non-stop rain has kept us indoors today. Some say this is the beginning of rainy season. We are skeptical, as it usually doesn't start until late May, early June. Who knows? I decided we really needed an activity, a new one. So I made play dough...and Sophia played and played and played. Actually we all did, we had fun creating any and every thing. I decided I should have made us each our own batch since we were having so much fun too.
This is my first time making this, but I tried this recipe because I didn't want a 'sticky' play dough, which some at home recipes are. This turned out great, even though I had no food coloring!

1 cup flour
1/2 cup salt
2 tsp cream of tarter
1 cup water
1 TBS cooking oil

mix flour, salt and cream of tarter. Add water and mix well. cook on med/high heat in the 1 TBS oil stirring constantly until if comes together and forms a ball. Knead a little bit to get lumps out. Store in air tight container.



I made this airplane (whale? you decide), and I made deep indentions for the windows and Sophia loaded the plane up with lots of 'people', lots of them.




then we got out these cookie cutters from Poppy and CC, they are farm animals, she couldn't use them very well but she had fun trying



we are hoping for a little sunshine to get moving on our 'to do' list before going to Bangkok, but the rain has cooled things off incredibly...we are thankful for it!

Real Water Splashing

David went with our neighbors and their son (Caleb) out to our helper's village to experience some real water splashing. They had a blast. Thanks again K for braving the dousing to get good pics!

what a sweet hug this man is giving David




fun and games, at least it is not water balloons! ouch.


David and Caleb with water guns ready


David in the middle of the action, re-upping the water supply


all the pretty girls dressed and ready with their buckets (our helper is far left)

The next three photos are of our helper literally 'water splashing'

Water splashing with Caleb

These series of pics are in front of our apartment during one of the days of water splashing festival. David took Sophia out, with his huge super soaker in hand and they had a blast. Sophia loves playing with Caleb...these pics are all courtesy of K. Thanks girl! and I had to include the pic of Caleb himself, as it was too priceless to pass up....Sophia could not figure out the squirt gun but she had fun trying...

coffee

we are not coffee connoisseurs by any means. But we can tell a good cup of coffee when we taste one. We drink decaf, of course. Recently in the mail we received some great coffee creamers which can mask some bad coffee pretty well. We finally ran out of coffee and I asked K, our neighbor if she had any she was willing to part with, she also being a decaf drinker. She said we were welcome to some though it was a bit old, so we got one small bag and one big container of Folgers (I know you connoisseurs are gagging). I just opened the folgers and made some, mainly because coffee is one of my favorite smells...the morning conversation with David went like this:

Me: "so what did you think of the coffee?"
D: "okay, not as good as the other stuff, its okay."
Me: "well, actually it is Waaaayyyy past the expiration date....you know it is old when you open it up and the coupon advertisement on the top...."
David interrupts: "...has a picture of a guy with a mullet on it?"
Me, laughing hard now, " well, yeah, that's good, but I was going to say. when the coupon expired in 2007"

we drank our bad cup of Joe, masked with good creamer, and laughed at ourselves for actually semi-enjoying two year old coffee.