Spinach: The Green Monster Smoothie

I was standing at my blender, literally thinking: This is the grossest thing I have ever made. I can’t believe people are getting away with hawking this on Pinterest like it’s some kind of dietary miracle.

I’m a skeptical person by nature, and when I see/read/hear something (pinterest-ed or not), that seems too good to be true, well I typically choose to believe that it’s just not true and move on. But for some reason food-related truths and half-truths are really bugging me right now. I feel like I’m on a crusade to debunk every pin that claims that this DELICIOUS food is also NO CALORIES and if you click on my blog and then make the hidden recipe, you will then magically be TRANSFORMED INTO A SUPERMODEL. And that is how I ended up blending a banana and four cups of spinach.

[Note: This is not my photo. I'll take one later and post it so you know I'm telling the truth.  You can find this image/blog by google searching "green monster smoothie"]

Dubious Pin: The Green Monster Smoothie (if you have a pinterest account, you’ve seen this floating around). 

Dubious Recipe Instructions: Add Spinach to your favorite smoothie and you can’t taste it even though it looks like Vom.

Back to me standing in front of my blender, salivating with delight at the thought of writing a full blown rant on how wrong everyone is. Pan out: I stop the blender, drop a straw into the blender cup (I’m not getting a glass dirty for this), and tentatively take a sip.

You can see where this is going. It actually doesn’t suck. The spinach smoothie actually doesn’t taste..bad…it’s kind of good?...it’s…good. Damn. Hot damn this is actually good. My quest was totally derailed, and I have happened upon a way to eat four cups of spinach almost painlessly. Transition shot to me happily jumping on the bandwagon.

Here’s the way I made spinach not taste like spinach. I haven’t tried all the other ways, but I probably will because let’s face it, I’m not really good at eating my greens and this seems sort of miraculous.

Spinach Smoothie

Here’s what you need:

1 banana, peeled, cut, and frozen

1 generous tablespoon of creamy peanut butter

½ Cup of 0% Greek Yogurt

1 Cup of Vanilla Soy Milk

4 Freaking Cups of Spinach (or less, if that much doesn’t fit in the blender after everything else is in).

Here’s what you do:

You can see where this is going, right. I put all the ingredients, in the order listed, in the blender and: Blend. After that you can email me and we can exclaim some more about how crazy this is. Crazy because it’s super high in Vitamin A, Iron, and Protein: All things that I’m pretty sure you need for survival. The moral of the story: if you have a blender, your survival is assured; or: maybe don’t hate on every recipe that’s “good for you.”

Here are the deets: