What's In Your Smoothie?

You're going to think I've totally gone off the deep end. This weekend I made a smoothie for my lunch. Yea, that's not nuts. I put 2 cups of fresh spinach in it. That used to be thought of as crazy, but now green smoothies are more commonplace. My kids were having sweet potato for their veggie so.... it sort of just jumped into my blender. And I LIKED it!

Here's my usual smoothie un-recipe. 1-2 cups fresh or lightly steamed greens, 1-2 frozen bananas, 1/4-1/2 cup frozen cherries, squirt of Barlean's Vegan Omega Swirl, small scoop of vegan rice protein powder and water. I change up the fruits all the time but this is my favorite - the cherries are strong enough of a flavor to calm down the amount of greens that I put in.

Here's the part where you're going to think I've lost it. Today I added steamed cauliflower. I'm not talking about a small bite but close to 1 cup full of it. My son was totally perplexed as to why I was putting the white snow-trees in the blender...but then he made sure that I was going to share. That's my boy! Adventurous eaters unite! I'll be honest. This is NOT my favorite veggie by any means. I have a curry cauliflower soup recipe that I love, but that's about it. I can certainly taste it in my smoothie - but it's OK!

I know you're saying "why, why, why?!?" at this point. Maybe you're not. Perhaps you're as nutty as me. Anyway. Remember my post yesterday about my plan for the year? About how I want to use up what I have? I hate throwing away food. It makes me feel so bad when something sits in the fridge for too long. Today I had cauliflower in the fridge that needed to be eaten. I think I found my new favorite way to eat up steamed veggies!

Here's another idea I had a while back - It's rare that I eat up all of the spinach that I get from our local farmers or the grocery store before it goes bad. I started very lightly steaming it and freezing it for smoothies in individual servings in freezer bags. I am not a fan of plastic bags by ANY means but my freezer is too small to hold everything in glass and I wash and reuse the bags until they fall apart, then I can usually find another use for them still. Anyway, to use less bags, I put the steamed greens onto a pan in little smoothie-sized piles. Then I flash froze it and put them into just 1 bag! I wasn't sure if it would work or if they're freeze together. Let me tell you, it worked! Yay!

I'd love to hear your ideas for reusing and making sure what you have in the kitchen gets used up. And if you do try a strange smoothie, tell me about it!

New Year

Happy New Year!

Wow. That's a little late, eh? Did you make resolutions? I usually don't. I do, however, like to set the tone of my year by it's first few months. This year, I'm going to work more on living my life with what I already have. Less consumerism. Less waste. I know, building a beautiful fabric and yarn stash is fun, and believe me, I have my stash. I want to do my best to use what I have already. This will be good for me. I do not mean just crafting, though. I want to do this in my food/grocery planning, with our clothing, with my family's other needs... I also want to blog about it when I have a minute and, as always, I *LOVE* reading your responses and ideas! Ready to jump into the year of use what you have, upcycle, make do and make it new? I am!

You get the chance to benefit from some of this too. It also means DESTASHING what I know I'm really never going to use. Take this:

I've never opened these. Back when I was knitting custom woolies by the doze

n I had grand ideas of dying my own yarn. Then I got more into sewing and less into knitting. While I'd love to give it a try, it hasn't happened and it's probably not going to. They'll be listed (at a much reduced price than I paid for them) in my shop soon.

And this:

This is a great and fun and easy to follow quilting book and is in fantastic condition. It has 10 cute patterns in it. My very first official quilt was the turtle you see on the front. I also had plans to make a few others in here but...it hasn't happened so... it is ready for a new home.

As I go through my crafting stash, I will likely find more gems. I'll try to post them here first to give you a heads up.

My kids and I have also being practicing this concept with their crafting. Namely, their valentines. What we did is not a new idea, but I can't wait to write about it and share my photos with you soon! I'm working on ideas that will prevent my family from wasting food as well. And I already have several clothes sewing projects in the works for Spring/Summer that involve upcycling, stash busting, and repurposing. Yay!