Super ingredients: part 1, the greens

I wanna take a break from recipes and pictures. I'm gonna tell you about some of my favorite ingredients and how they help the body!  I’m also going to test my skills by making this as non-boring as possible. Personally, I find all of this most intriguing…but if you’re not of the same mind, then by all means, skip this post …

or wait a few days till I can post about my new sweet crazy love: Bumble Bars. Delicious and nutritious.

Favorite smoothie ingredients:

Kale is a highly nutritious green with lots of antioxidant properties. It’s rich in calcium and also high in beta carotene and lutein, both of which are good for your eyes! I think kale is my favorite green to put in green smoothies.  It doesn’t have an intense flavor, which is nice sometimes. Regular kale is pretty awesome, but dinosaur kale is just plain cool.  It’s got all these bumps and ridges on it, like a dinosaur’s skin. Hence the name! :)

Spinach is also an antioxidant green! Some of spinach’s special properties are: calcium, iron, protein, and selenium.  Selenium is said to reverse the aging process.  Woot! If you want a more extensive list of what you’re getting when you eat spinach, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinach

Dandelion greens. You know those annoying plants that grow in your backyard? The kind that have the yellow flowers? Maybe when you were little you used to pick a bunch for your mom…cause they’re flowers and moms like flowers. She accepted with thanks and a smile, but what she didn’t tell you was that they were actually weeds. Totally would have killed the moment. 

Anyway.

You can eat the green part! I’m sure this isn’t news to most of you…it isn’t even news to me, but I never figured I’d actually be enjoying the effects of these little weeds, much less consuming them. Super good for a liver detox. Apparently also good for eczema! Looks like I scored. The taste is slightly bitter, but a banana and a mango should do the trick to cover it up. Oh! Another random fact I just came across: you can use the dandelion blossoms to make wine! Who knew?

Mustard greens also help with liver detoxing.  And they remove heavy metals from the body. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like the idea of having metal (heavy or otherwise) in my body.  No, thank you.  Mustard green smoothies are not for the faint of heart…they have a pretty strong taste.  And don’t even think about making a mustard green smoothie and then letting it sit in the fridge for more than a day.  It burns, people.  And the taste has a vague horseradish tang to it. Mind you, I ate it all (gotta get rid of those metals!), but I took it slow.

Something to remember about greens:  “…Plants “allow” humans and animals to eat ALL of their fruits, but only PART of their leaves, because plants need to have leaves for their own use – which is manufacturing chlorophyll. However, plants depend on moving creatures for many different reasons, like pollination, fertilizing the soil, and hanging around to help eat the ripe fruit. For this reason, plants accumulate a lot of highly nutritious elements in their leaves, but mix these nourishing ingredients with either bitterness or very small amounts of alkaloids (poisons).”  Because of the alkaloids, you need to rotate the greens so the alkaloids don't build up. If you wanna read the rest of this article by Victoria Boutenko go to: http://greensmoothiesblog.com/green-smoothie-rotate


more later... :)
chow!