I am going to make a startling confession here. Ready? Okay,
here goes.
I hate salad.
Yes, you heard right. The woman who calls herself the
Wholesome Hedonist can’t stand a leafy green (or a leafy purple, or a leafy
white.)
I don’t know what it is about salad. Perhaps it’s my preference for hot,
hearty comfort foods, or my dislike of the bland semi-crunch of lettuce. Whatever the reason, you will always
find me far, far away from the salad bar (one notable exception is arugula,
which the Italians converted me to by perching it atop a sublime pizza in Rome.)
I know greens are good for you. And I know I
should eat them more frequently (and so should you.) So I have found some
unique ways to work then into my meals. My best solution? Working them into
a smoothie. A cup of spinach is virtually undetectable in smoothies, so I take
a few clumps of frozen spinach out of the freezer and throwthem into whatever
concoction I’m making, from blueberry banana to mango lassis. (It doesn’t do
much for the colour, but at least I can’t taste it.)
What are your tips for sneaking in your greens?
a) Roasted vegetables. Nuff said :)
ReplyDeleteb) As an accompaniment to meat. Surprisingly, the one-bite-of-salad-one-bite-of-steak model works REALLY well - Meat is often a really heavy flavour, and I crave the crunch of lettuce and veg to offset it when I have steak. Then again, I love eating vegetables with my hands, so that might do it.
Related question, something I've always wanted to ask: Does the recent adage "Eat only what your grandmother would recognize" apply to veg smoothies? I've been told often that the more processing that goes into a food, the more of its nutrients we lose; does that hold with smoothies? How badly are the nutrients in vegetables affected by pulverizing them in a blender to make a smoothie?
Just blending the vegetables is not processing them; you are not altering their makeup in anyway, so a smoothie is just as nutritious as the whole vegetable. There are a couple of watchouts, though:
Delete1) Beware juicing, which removes the pulp and so most of the fibre and many of the nutrients.
2) Because you drink a smoothie, sometimes you may ingest a lot more than you would if you were eating the ingredients (e.g. you might put an apple, a banana and an orange into a smoothie, whereas you would normally just eat the apple as a sitting.) Try to limit it to one serving of fruit per smoothie, otherwise the sugar (and calories) add up very fast. Fill it out with veggies (usually lower cal and sugar), yogurt and milk.