Strawberry Spinach Surprise

Hello again. So, before I start explaining my first concoction, I want to go more into the concept of this blog. 
My primary goal in this blog is to help my audience (namely college students) to be able to have a quick, healthy breakfast in the hectic mornings. If you are a college student, you're floormates will probably not appreciate a blender going off at 7 AM. The great thing about these smoothies is that you can make them in batches ahead of time. I like to make my smoothies on Sunday, enough to last me a week. Now, some people, primarily my mother, have told me that once the fruits are blended, they begin to lose their nutrients unless you drink it right away. However, according to an article in livestrong.com, writer Jennifer King says that only heat, light, and oxidation can cause fruit to lose its nutrients. Although it is better to drink the smoothie right away before it is overexposed to oxygen, the loss of nutrients would take time. The best course of item is to chill 
it right away in order to keep heat from making the
fruits lose nutrients. 
So what you should take from this is to put it in the
fridge as soon as you make it. 
Onward to the actual smoothie making adventure.
I had a hard time finding the exact ingredients I was
looking for based on my research. After combing 
through several blogs on the perfect green smoothie

I found out that there should be a base, greens, 

Add a dash of healthy!

I know, appetizing right

fruit, fiber, healthy fats, and an optional sweetener. For my first attempt of a smoothie, I decided to use kefir as a base. For those of you who don't know what kefir is, it's a type of fermented milk. It's pretty much just a yogurt drink with probiotic bacteria that is very good for your stomach. Drinking it plain, kefir tastes like a slightly more sour version of yogurt. The one I found at Safeway was blueberry flavored kefir. Although the blueberry helped with the sourness, it had some of the added sugars I was trying to avoid. However, I have to work with what I have. I chose frozen strawberries as my fruit, but fresh will work as well. I used a cup of spinach as my greens, as you can see from the picture on the left. I then topped it off with honey to sweeten it and ground flaxseed to add fiber. Looks delicious, I know. The blender I used is called a Magic Bullet, and its about the size of a venti cup of coffee. It's very portable and easy to wash, which is ideal for a college student. The first time I made this, it was
incredibly loud. I discovered that was because I 
added everything at the same time and blended. However, on later attempts, I blended the spinach and yogurt first before adding the 
strawberries to mute the sound a bit. 
The results was surprisingly good. It was a little tart, probably because of the kefir, but the taste of spinach and wheatgrass was completely gone. It tasted only of the strawberries and the yogurt. When complemented with bread, it was
quite filling as well.

Snap on the rim, and drink it on the go!

in

Meet the Blogger

Hello everyone, my name is Sania Baqai and I am a freshman (freshwoman? freshperson? freshgenderneutralbeing?) at Santa Clara University in California.

This font is kind of boring. Can I change it? Ok, I can change the color. And the size. Oh here we go. That sucks, the choices are super limited. 

Oh well, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But I digress. (Fair warning, that will probably happen a lot.)

 So this blog is a project for my Critical Thinking and Writing class focused on food. The topic I chose is smoothies! I know, it sounds boring, but I'm going to go beyond the status quo and add what every college student (or just me) seems to have a phobia of: vegetables! I plan on making healthy, balanced  smoothies chock full of fruits and vegetables and all sorts of other healthy things that I still need to do research on. By the way, if you didn't understand the title, it's supposed to be a play on "smoothie to kill for." It's funny because kale is a vegetable people usually put in smoothies. Smoothies to kale for? Smoothies to kill for? Get it? 
Never mind.

Back to the point. I was first introduced to the ideas of 'green smoothies' (what the mainstream/Oprah call it)  by seeing it on random comedies on TV. I would see the stereotypical 'health/fitness nut' who always doing push ups, stuff eggshells and broccoli and who knows what else in a blender and slug it down. Needless to say, the idea of a green smoothie, no matter how hyperbolic it probably was on TV, did not seem appealing to me. 

When I started seeing people on food blogs do it though, I wavered. The smoothies these people were making had strawberries and pineapple, and yes, vegetables such as spinach, but they assured me the spinach was virtually tasteless. So I started warming to the idea and told myself I would try that eventually, if only to have a funny story to tell to my friends.

That was two years ago. I pretty much forgot about the idea of green smoothies until I went to hang out at my friends house. After lunch, we both craved dessert, but she was on a diet, so most of my ideas were vetoed. The only thing we could really settle on was fruit, but as most people could tell you, I am not a fan of raw fruit and vegetables. Which, I know, is a pretty bad idea, but I generally don't like eating raw fruits or vegetables unless I have to. 

I had then brought up the idea of green smoothies, which my friend immediately pounced on. Her mom was a health nut, so the house was full of Vitamix blenders and wheatgrass and whatever else you need to make a smoothie. We stopped by Safeway to pick up a bag of frozen berries, which we ensured had nothing else but berries ("My mom will kill me if I bring non-organic berries with added sugars into the house") and set off to start. After a lot of experimentation, it actually turned out pretty good. We had her siblings taste it without telling them the added vegetables and they loved it. Our Green Smoothie (ours was actually purple) was a hit. 

So why am I writing a blog about these? A few reasons.

Many college students don't eat breakfast. They simply get up and go to classes. I wanted to think of a breakfast idea that you could make in advance and eat it to go every day through out the week. It had to be healthy though, because stuffing ourselves with sugary cereal bars probably isn't a better alternative to not eating anything at all. 

Also, I don't like raw fruits or vegetables. I recorded everything I ate for an project a few months ago and I was pretty surprised how little I filled the daily nutritional pyramid. What on earth have I been eating? I would have one serving of vegetables a day, and it would be french fries. My fruit serving would come from skittles and the occasional orange flavored corn syrup (they called it orange juice). 

So, that is it for now. I'll do some more research on the perfect smoothie and my next post will be my probably disastrous attempts at making a nutritional smoothie. Don't worry, I'll have a panel of taste testers to try it out, so if it tastes terrible, I'll be sure to tell you before you go out and try to make it yourself. 

-Sania