back to hippie food

Much as I loved my breakfast taco and Malbec diet in Austin, my tummy was starting to rebel by the end.

I guess I am officially an annoying food blogger, because I was straight-up craving a green smoothie. We’re going to gourmet-ify it and call it “chilled soup”, which it is… ish. I do, after all, eat it in a bowl with a spoon.

This one featured another product sent to me by the Youbar people.

Protein exhausts me. If I could, I would mostly ignore it. I like eating fruits and vegetables and carb upon carb upon carb. Well and fat, too. Cheese! Olive oil! Etc.

I am irritated by the artificialness of protein powder, but I like the ease of it- with meat you have the psychological implications of factory farming, the potential biohazards of salmonella and their ilk, and I will crave a burger or a steak maybe once every six months but in general I just don’t need that much meat.

So anyway, to combat the inherent gritty chalkiness of protein powder, I dissolved it with 1/2 cup of water before adding it to my smoothie chilled soup.

 

And then combined it with:

1 cup frozen spinach, micro-thawed for 1 minute
1/2 frozen banana
1/2 cup milk
handful of ice

And then to round out my meal I had one of my pear muffins, which was really an antique at this point but had been refrigerated and smelled and tasted okay.

Thoughts on the protein powder? It had a nicely short ingredient list of soy protein, organic cane juice, and organic vanilla powder (wish the soy had been organic too…). The smoothie was a bit chalky, unsurprisingly. I don’t hold protein powder to particularly high standards. It is what it is. Not bad.

And actually everything came together quite nicely when I crumbled the muffin on the smoothie soup smoup :D

  

Another food blogger lunch- a salad that incorporated as much of the color wheel (and food pyramid) as possible.

Dark Green light green red blue/black orange. Protein fiber calcium lycopene monounsaturated fatty acids!

It’s all about quality ingredients: farmer’s market lettuce, blissful Haas avocado, chipotle salsa, TJ’s black bean dip, and Harry and David Cheddar- the last of it!

I almost didn’t add the cheese (I have been eating RAWTHER a lot of it lately) but then I went ahead and… did! And it tied everything together so perfectly with its wonderful sharp cheesiness mmm mm mm.

And then for lunch… calling this “dessert” is a stretch but I do consider it a treat… ants on a log! Well, actually, just log. Classed-up log of organic celery and almond butter. Mmm mm hippie food!

And THE classic food blogger dessert the other night, one I love and haven’t had in too long- frozen banana soft serve. Mmm mm mm.

There are times (like in Thailand) when I’ve been known to brush aside all other food groups and just eat fruit all day, but my intake has actually been a little low lately. What a wonderful thing to be stepping up my consumption of!