Drink Your Spinach and Eat Your Darts

There is a chef boyardee beef ravioli commercial from the seventies in which a father is sitting beside his son, talking to his wife in another room about an up-coming dart tournament,  and telling her he is much too nervous about it to eat a thing.  At the same time he is absent-mindedly forking back his kid’s food.  The voice over suggests that kids aren’t the only ones who love beef ravioli.  His wife comes in and sees what he’s doing, and with some chagrin he says to his son “Eat your darts.  Umm, eat your ravioli.”

Maybe things were funnier in the seventies or maybe we had fewer quality things to laugh at, because for a while after this commercial aired we repeated that ‘eat your darts’ phrase a lot.  Sufficient times to have it stuck somewhere in the recesses of my brain for over thirty years.  Makes me wonder what the hell else is buried in there.

Anyway, it’s what I thought of when I typed ‘drink your spinach’.  Drinking it is a super easy way to choke down some good-for-you green stuff.

In descending order –

frozen berries

plain greek yogurt

baby spinach

one small banana

2 scoops of arbonne vanilla vitamin mineral shake mix

no sugar added 100% antioxia fruit juice (this one is wild berry and pomegranate I think, or cranberry raspberry saskatoon?)

When this is blended its purple and it tastes like a fruit smoothie.

But is disgustingly healthy.

Do some jedi mind tricks on yourself or think about dart tournaments to forget the spinach is in there if you need to.

I like spinach in salads as long as it’s not the main ingredient but I find myself (absent-mindedly) skipping it half the time, so this has become my alternative and relatively painless method of consuming it.

It might not work as well for me if the whole thing turned green.

If It’s Too Healthy, I Can Fix That

A salad platter. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I try to watch what I eat.  I read labels for sugar and salt and chemical content.  I rarely buy things that have the nutritional value of cardboard, even though they probably taste amazing.  I try to get enough protein.  And anti-oxidants and vitamin C and calcium and all those other healthy things that are supposed to keep you alive and kicking.

On days that I work I take a salad with me for lunch.  This started several months ago, and frankly no one is more surprised than me that I’ve kept it up for so long. Some days I’m more creative than others.  It depends on how much chopping time I’ve allowed myself and what kinds of things are in my crisper.  I’ve become really tired of peppers so I’ve taken a break from them, but celery, carrots, red cabbage, spinach, romaine, green onions, tomatoes – all these things have become staples.  I add chopped hard-cooked eggs, tuna, ham, crumbled bacon, leftover meat or cheese.  Then there’s all the salad dressings and salad toppings and nuts and seeds to choose from, and voila – it rarely gets boring.

However, as with any healthy food choice regimen, it’s pretty easy to stray off the straight and narrow, a bit at a time until you’re deluding yourself that it’s all good.  Like yesterday, for instance.  In my fridge I’m down to lettuce, carrots, celery and toppings.  (Yes, I need to go shopping.)  I made ranch dressing with Epicure spices, plain greek yogurt and a dollop of mayo.  None of that is bad, but before I ate the salad I threw in half a bag of garlic ginger wonton strips.  When the salad was gone and there was still dressing left over, I used it as a dip for the rest of the strips.  It was just like chips and dip minus the guilt.  Until the entire bag of salad toppings, which should have lasted through several salads, was empty.  And I was full.  Of mostly wontons.

The santa fe tortilla strips don’t even need dip, they’re that good all on their own.  Never mind how I know that.

What got me started on all this was finding a recipe in amongst my piles of papers that need to be sorted, even though I wasn’t sorting at all and merely moving them from one location to another.  It’s a recipe for creamy potato soup which I used to make all the time until I realized it’s full of POTATOES and carbs and starch and butter and flour and other deadly things.  And begs for thick slices of garlic bread on the side.

But just in case there’s anyone out there who would like a shorter life and a hearty soup that’s truly delicious, here’s the recipe. 

In a dutch oven combine 10 medium potatoes, 2 carrots, 4 celery stalks, one onion, (all vegetables chopped),  1 crushed garlic clove, salt and pepper, 3 cups of chicken broth and water to cover.  Bring to a boil and then simmer until vegetables are tender.

In another pot, melt 3/4 cup butter, add 1 tsp salt, 3/4 cup flour.  Make a smooth paste and bring to a boil.  Add 4 cups milk, stir and cook until smooth, add to soup.  Cook until thickened.

Serve with bacon bits, chopped green onion and shredded cheddar cheese.  (But no wonton or tortilla strips please.  We have to draw the line somewhere.)

A Recipe!

I’m so excited!  I’ve never posted a recipe on my blog before!

It’s Sunday and work doesn’t start until 11:00 so I’ve got some time to kill and I’m sitting here enjoying my breakfast shake and thinking it would be a brilliant idea to share it.

So here’s the ingredients.

1.  A cup or so of some kind of healthy fruit juice mixture, the more purple and weird the better.  (Blueberry and Pomegranate is my favourite, but if boring old orange works for you, that’s perfectly okay.)

2.  1 banana (but not the skin, for those of you who don’t cook a lot)

3.  2 scoops of Arbonne Essentials Vitamin/Mineral Shake Mix (Vanilla).  Or you could substitute your choice of protein powder, but the Arbonne stuff is the absolute best.

4.  Some frozen fruit, like blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries.  Obviously I’m partial to berries, but any fruit works, as long as it’s frozen.

5.  A big glob (sorry, I don’t measure) of greek yogurt.  (Yes, if you must, you can use whatever yogurt you like, but the greek stuff is VERY good.)  I use plain or vanilla.

6.  Anything else you might have hanging around that you’d like to get rid of.  I’ve added some orange sections, a couple of carrot ends, and a sliced apple – but not all at the same time.  Don’t get too carried away.

Method:  Place all ingredients in a blender and mix it up on the highest setting.  Does anybody ever use any of those other buttons?  I do everything on Liquefy because that’s the whole point of blenders.

Pour into a tall glass and enjoy.  It should be smooth and cold and delicious.

Now all it needs is a name.  Like Liquefied Lunch, because it doesn’t have to be limited to a morning meal.

There’s a girl at work who mixes up skim milk with a banana, peanut butter, and four cups of spinach.  I can’t comment on how it tastes because I’ve never tried it, but I can tell you it is extremely GREEN.  So it’s quite amazing the things we can consume when they’re all smushed up and unrecognizable.

But if you’re new at this, my advice is to start off with purple first. It doesn’t look like it’s good for you even though it is;  whereas green is not fooling anyone.