Green smoothies

When I started to blog I knew it was going to be difficult to find time to update regularly, but this has been the longest blog post draught so far! I just feel exhausted when I get home after long day at work, and many days I don't even open the laptop. When I get home, my evening is filled with juicing, making dinner and Maya's food for next day, playing with Maya and by the time she's gone to bed and I have a chance to sit down and take a breath, I just want to go to bed myself with a good book. And of course I fall asleep within 5 minutes instead of reading that book... 

As for my food intake, it's been up and down again. I'm failing to find a method that really works for me, Rose's levels 5 raw transition diet worked for a while, but somehow it didn't appeal to me for longer than a month. It seems to be same with any changes I try to make to my diet, it lasts about 6-8 weeks after which I really need help to stay on track. So I'm now going to try something else to help my journey towards raw food - green smoothies. I had my first one today - green smoothie with romaine lettuce and watermelon. It wasn't as good as it could be as the watermelon I had was one of those pale ones without seeds, probably genetically modified to become seedless and therefore also tasteless. Have you noticed that only watermelons with lots of dark brown seeds have rich, red flesh with lots of flavour? So note to myself - check that the watermelon I buy is NOT seedless. Or any other fruit for that matter. 

Anyway, my latest plan is to add green smoothies to my fairly healthy, semi-vegetarian diet and see if this helps me to switch more towards raw food. Victoria Bountenko says in her book Green for Life that adding a litre of green smoothie to your diet will help with various health problems and also helps to curb your cravings. I've been having bad cheese toast cravings, I hope to get rid of these with help of green smoothies. 

Here are some recipes:

Blend well following:

8 leaves romaine lettuce leaves

1/3 of watermelon

200-250 ml water and some ice

Blend well following:

2 handfuls of kale

1/2 ripe pineapple

200-250 ml water and some ice 

Blend well following:

6-8 romain lettuce leaves 

1/2 medium honeydew melon

300-400 ml water and some ice

Many raw food books originate from USA and one problem for me has been their different measurements they use in their cook books. One of the most common measurement is a cup. What is 1 cup? If a recipe says 2 cups of water, do you know how much it is? I didn't before but my friend Google helped me:

1 cup = 240 ml = 8 fl oz = 1/2 pint (liq) = 16 tbsp = 48 tsp

Another one is a quart, which I've never heard of before. It's almost 1 litre (0.95 l), so luckily easy to remember. 

I'm now going to look into various greens I can get hold of here in UK (selection seems tiny, at least in supermarkets). Besides the "usual suspects" spinach, kale, broccoli, pok choi, celery and romaine lettuce Victoria mentions greens I've never heard of: arugula, escarole, mizuna, lambsquaters (wild weed) and so on. From now on I'm also going to use beet and carrot tops, mustard greens, collard greens, radicchio and green herbs such as dill, basil, coriander (cilantro in US), fennel, mint and parsley in my green smoothies. Amongst more unusual greens are the wild weeds such as chickweed, clover, dandelion and stinging nettles. On my next walk to park I'll check out these super-greens! 

As always I'm full of enthusiasm when embarking on a new culinary path, I sooo hope this will last. Wish me luck!