Moving On

This summer has been officially named the Summer of Smoothies. By me. It all started on a trip to Big Y with Dad early on in our summer travels to Connecticut. We were in the produce section near the strawberries and tucked in one corner were some packets. Now this was no ordinary packet, it was a smoothie packet!! Dad said, "Get it" and who am I to argue. Little did I know that I'd be searching for those babies high and low all over the greater Philadelphia area.

Well, after much patience and perseverance I managed to find the first few packets at my favorite food store Save-a-lot (because you really do save a lot!). They were banana flavored and orange flavored. I preferred the orange and D the banana, but both were very tasty. Then Save-a-lot seemed to catch on to this smoothie idea and really run with it so the flavors I then bought were Mango and Lemon Ice. Again, both were extreeeeeemly yummy and well worth the 59-69 cents. But that delicious strawberry kind still eluded me.

Even though Save-a-lot was very good to me, I was still checking ShopRite every now and then in hopes of finding strawberry. No such luck...until one day when D and I were food shopping and I had long since given up on finding strawberry--there it was. Right next to the chocolate banana flavor!! I scooped up the remaining five packets ready and willing to spend the inflated price of 99 cents, until I looked at David. Ok so I really didn't need all five strawberry packets but it felt good to hold all of them after my exhausting but ultimately fruitful (um, no pun intended) search. So three packets went back and a chocolate banana was added and off we went to find some frozen strawberries. If you couldn't tell already, strawberry smoothies are my favorite.

I would be remiss if I didn't tell you about the pineapple coconut flavor that D found at Target. This kind came in liquid form and while it was tasty, it was very strong and not our favorite. In my opinion, stick to the powder packets.

There is an art to making smoothies that you may not know about. D got me a Dunkin' Donuts smoothie one time and while it was good, it just wasn't my style. We both like our smoothies thick, not watery (yuk!). To get this consistency you need lots of ice. However ice then waters the flavor down and well that's not good either. So my brilliant and ever-thinking husband decided to freeze the fruit we use in the smoothie. And boy does this work out very well. We add some ice, the fruit, a bit of juice or soy milk and blend these ingredients. We then add the powder from the packets and blend again. The smoothie is then poured into our special smoothie glasses (like D is holding in the picture below) and there you have dessert or a late-night snack. Healthy and delicious, what more could you ask for?

I think I may have talked about smoothies a little bit...ok a lot a bit...at work because this morning my friend comes into work with a bag full of goodies and said she'd be right back with a surprise for me. Now we are always talking about food: how to make it, where to eat it, what is good at such and such a restuarant, what we made for dinner last night, so I guessed it'd be some sort of food product. Before I knew it she plopped down two banana smoothies on the table saying, "You talk so much about them that I thought I should give them a try so I could converse with you." Whatever the reasoning, I got to enjoy an unexpected banana smoothie this morning...and I noticed that my friend finished all of hers too.