Tag: greens

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Green Monster Power Smoothie

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No pretty pictures, I know, but healthy and yummy none the less 🙂

There are great benefits to eating lots of greens, yes, you all heard it before, but some days it is hard to fit all that healthy stuff into your food chain between running from work to get the kids or whatever your busy life dictates. Well for days when you don’t have the time to sit down to a hearty spinach omelet you can, even if you don’t have a juicer, make yourself this amazing tasting green power smoothie. Having a juicer can be a great addition to your healthy diet, as long as you’re aware of he fact that you’ll be missing out on all the healthy fiber that you would have consumed eating the veggies. I also want to caution you on juicing fruit, you definitely want to stay HEAVY on the vegetable side. Fruit juice no matter if store-bought or homemade will affect your blood sugar level drastically, much more so than eating the whole fruit would have done. From a weight loss and even a ‘having even energy all day’ point of view, not a good thing. And if you are borderline pre diabetic, just plain BAD idea.

So in this Smoothie you’re not only going to get your greens (without feeling like a cow on the pasture) but all the healthy fiber is still there, hurray!

Added benefit when you’re maligned this with spinach: the lemon juice in the Smoothie provides vitamin c which is essential for your body to absorb the iron from the spinach!

Ingredients

  • 2 handful of Spinach leaves (or stemmed lake or collards, chopped)
  • 1 ripe banana
  • 2 cups water
  • Juice of 1 large lemon
  • 2-3 tbsp coconut/palm sugar, or honey or agave syrup (add more if you like it sweet)
  • (Optional: 2 tbsp egg white powder or protein powder)
  • You could also add a peeled Kiwi

Directions

  1. Place greens in the blender and add the two cups of water, pulse a few times to get started, pushing down the top layer of leaves if they don’t incorporate.
  2. Add the banana, lemon juice, sugar and if using protein powder. Pulse and blend until smooth
  3. Serve. Makes about 4 cups

Note: you should drink this right away, don’t make it in advance, first the Smoothie separates into solids and liquid pretty quickly (I just re-blend for the second glass) but secondly the nutrients that were happily stored inside the leaves are now exposed to the air and will start oxidizing and therefore loose potency.

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Copyright © 2011 Simple Healthy Homemade. All rights reserved

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Four Greens Vegetable Soup

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Today I got myself a Crinkle Cutter! I know, I know that might not sound very exiting for you, but I am a sucker for kitchen gadgets, especially when they are on sale. And it just so happened that my local grocery store had them on closeout sale… what can I say

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So now being the proud owner of a brand new crinkle cutter, I realize there are many, many things that could be ‘crinkled’ with this, but to start I decided to try it on something relatively soft, hoping to get an easy start, and picked zucchini. And since tonight they are calling for the first frost of the season a yummy vegetable soup seemed like the perfect fit.

As we are heading into the colder months with people worried about getting sick, many stay cooped up inside more than is good for them and a good many eat less vegetables than in the summer exposing them to higher risk of in fact getting sick, while also being exposed to more recycled air in a heated environment. Soooooo, I wanted to make something to give your system an antioxidant boost and what tastier and better way than greens could there be?

So for this mean-lean-green bad boy we are going to use kale, spinach, celery and zucchini (ok, ok, I know, not a ‘green’ but c’mon, you can see the color, right? 😉 )

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Ingredients:

  • 1 tbsp oil
  • 1/2 red onion, finely diced
  • 4 stalks celery, chopped
  • 1 small zucchini (crinkle cut, or sliced into 1/4″ rounds)
  • 1 can or 1 qt size bag frozen tomatoes *(if using canned, pick one that is either no salt added or a low sodium version)
  • 1 can canellini beans, drained and rinsed or 1 portion frozen **(snack bag size)
  • 1 good quality vegetable buillon cube, for making 2 cups(I use Rapunzel no salt added)
  • 1/2 to 1 tsp salt
  • 2 good hand fulls lacinato kale, center stalk removed, washed and trimmed
  • 3 to 4 oz baby spinach
  • small amount of whatever other veggie you have on hand that could stand to get used up (I had a little broccoli left)
  • Parmesan for grating on top (optional, note that using Parmesan would make the recipe no longer vegan or dairy free)
* Note: I have had great success dicing and freezing a bumper crop of tomatoes in zip top bags and using it instead of canned for soups and stews in the winter. Leave cherry tomatoes whole.
**Note: To save time, money and cut salt from your diet, buy dried beans, soak and cook them, (I use my pressure cooker) and freeze in snack size baggies to be used like you would canned.

Directions

  1. Heat oil in a soup pan, add the onion and cook over low until glazed and starting to turn soft
  2. Add celery, stir and cook until you can smell the celery, then add the tomatoes
  3. Fill the pot with water until the vegetables are covered by about 2″ of water, add salt and bouillon cube and if using tomato paste and parmesan chunk.
  4. Bring to a boil
  5. Add kale, zucchini and beans, cook until kale is soft.
  6. Divide spinach into serving bowls, using about 1 cup per dish, ladle the hot soup over and serve, if desired, with fresh grated Parmesan.

Makes about 6 bowls ( Serves six as a first course)

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Copyright © 2011 Simple Healthy Homemade. All rights reserved.