Seriously?

On The Biggest Loser this past week, Bob took one of the contestants into the kitchen to show her how to make a healthy snack…a smoothie.  He poured some milk into a blender and then pulled out a new item from Yoplait, a frozen package of fruit (and stuff).   When they cheered about how “easy” that was, I found myself yelling at the TV, “so is just putting fruit in a blender, you big doofus!”  I’m amazed at how we continue to make products to take the place of real food.  Nature keeps giving us the good stuff, been doing it for centuries, but corporations insist on taking a good thing and jacking it up by making “food-like” foods. 

I make smoothies a few times a week, and I do it without xanthum gum or sucralose or anything I can’t pronounce without having to sound it out.  In fact, a three year old can pronounce everything that goes into my smoothies, and can identify the ingredients on sight…. Milk, ice, banana, almond butter.  That’s my favorite go-to smoothie; it’s got the protein, fat and carb combo that fills me up and gives me energy.  Despite my best intentions I never seem to eat all my bananas before they start to get brown spots on them, so I throw them into smoothies.  Or I cut them up and freeze them – if you put frozen pieces of banana in your food processor and let it go for a while, you’ll have a healthy frozen dessert, like frozen yogurt, with just one ingredient: banana.

I realize that bananas don’t meet my “seasonal and local” criteria, but I make an exception for them:

A) I’m not moving to Costa Rica, Ecuador, Brazil or Mexico any time soon.  And B) they are so good for you – full of potassium which is one of the most important electrolytes in the body, regulating heart function and blood pressure.

Please don’t fall for the “convenience” foods created in a lab somewhere by some mad scientist, when the real thing is just as convenient and much healthier.  As Michael Pollan says in his book Food Rules, ”If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.” 

Banana Smoothie

2 cups ice (crush it beforehand if your blender doesn’t have an ice-crush mode)

½ cup organic, whole milk (can use almond milk)

1 banana, broken into pieces

1 tablespoon organic nut butter (almond, cashew or peanut)

Blend all ingredients adding more milk or water to get the consistency you prefer.

(When I’m feeling a little naughty, I add a drizzle of Trader Joe’s Midnight Moo Organic Chocolate Syrup and make it for dessert….shhhhhh)

Berry Smoothie

2 cups ice

Juice of 2 oranges

¼ cup Greek yogurt

1 cup fresh berries

1 teaspoon honey

Blend all ingredients adding more juice or water to get the consistency you prefer.

(Buy fresh berries at your farmers’ market before they are all gone and freeze them to put into smoothies until they come back in season again.)