Monday, September 19, 2016

A green twist

With the rain and hugelkultur beds pumping along, we've had some amazing crops of kale lately. The brush turkey's decimated a few plants, but we managed to save the rest. We finally have something to harvest in the garden again.




What I love about kale, is making green smoothies with them. Thankfully, we received a windfall of pineapples from the store recently too, marked down for quick sale, which is perfect for our favourite kind of green smoothie recipe.

These are simply delicious. Don't let the idea of the ingredients put you off. The end result is best tasted, to be believed. We didn't realise how addicted we would become to these, and it's the green smoothie, which is responsible for kale making it into my garden beds.





Several kale leafs and other ingredients (I'll share the recipe soon) yield us two green smoothies for breakfast. This is a very refreshing way to start the day and feel good. We just use an ordinary blender, so no fancy equipment, but there is a method I have discovered for making them blend smoother. Which I will also explain.

So here is my recipe for:

Gully Grove Green smoothies

with a twist~





Ingredients:

4 large kale leafs
1/4 cup raw cashews
1 teaspoon flax seed
1 cup chilled water
1/2 a pineapple, chopped

the twist - 2 nasturtium leafs


Method:

1. If the kale stems are too fibrous, remove them. If you have equipment that will pulverise everything with fibre, feel free to leave the stems on. Pull the leafs apart with your hands and place them in the blender.

2. Add the rest of the ingredients next, leaving the chopped pineapple last of all. This order is important to ensure a smoother blend. As the lower ingredients will blend quickly, without the fibre of the pineapple taking up the gumption of the blades at first.

3. Blend for a full minute. The pineapple should start to incorporate, after 30 seconds. If not, pulse a few times, then continue the extended blend.

4. Serve in glasses, and rinse equipment immediately in water. Easiest way to clean.

Adding the nasturtiums leafs, gives it a slight peppery taste, but also lightens the palette as you're drinking it. If you have a more expensive piece of equipment, feel free to use a cup of ice-cubes, instead of the water, and make it more slushy like. You can even freeze the diced pineapple overnight, if you think your equipment and brain (freeze) can handle it. But I would leave the water liquid, if you're going to freeze the pineapple.

This is the best way I know, how to consume kale fresh...and it's delicious!


3 comments:

  1. Yum! I love a green smoothie! Isn't it exciting to have so much rain. It should be a productive spring :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I know, and the rain keeps coming! I've been like a woman possessed in the garden, between downpours. I want to get plants in the ground!

      Delete
  2. Well, I made my smoothie! I didn't have cashews so used almonds and copied the recipe down wrongly so used a tablespoon of linseed and used a small tin of pineapple pieces instead of fresh. Otherwise it went well. I used Red Russian kale, which has purple leaves, so the end colour was a sort of khaki green, not very attractive but it tasted OK. I was surprised the pineapple flavour didn't come through strongly. There was no obvious flavour to describe, but it sure was healthy!

    ReplyDelete

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