Turkey Day Purge

Turkey Day Purge

The Green Smoothie

Every day, I'm thankful I have food to fill my stomach and my stomach was especially full over the Thanksgiving holiday. As with most of my holiday meals, there was nothing fat free about it. There was nothing even low fat about it."One-third less fat cream cheese?” I asked my sister while we shopped at Safeway. We needed cream cheese for our carrot cake frosting. She looked at me like I had grown another head. Chuckling, I put the package back on the shelf and grabbed the full fat one next to it.

After three days of feasting – family dinner on Thanksgiving day, leftovers on Friday, another Thanksgiving dinner with friends Saturday – my body needed a break; a break from all that protein, all the refined sugar, all the carbohydrates. I needed a cleanse.

I remembered a drink a friend of mine made with her ultra fancy can-grind-anything blender. Ironically, she made the drink while she was visiting me last Thanksgiving. That month, she was on a health kick and purchased the blender just to make healthy smoothies. She brought the blender over to show me how to make some of her concoctions and the one I remembered was one she simply called her green smoothie. You'll see why from the ingredients.

Spinach, parsley, granny smith apple, bartlett pear, lemon, ginger.

Then she started throwing everything into the blender. I mean everything. Spinach. Apple with stem, seeds and core. Ginger and lemon with peel still on. Extra fiber apparently. When she handed me the grass...I mean glass, I hesitated, just for an instant.

It was delicious and refreshing.

I felt like my insides were being scrubbed, the thick liquid sweet and tart at the same time; my breath, oh so fresh from the parsley.

And it was fat free. It was just what I wanted and needed after some serious gorging and that's what I made myself the Sunday after Thanksgiving. It was my breakfast and lunch.

The Green Smoothie

Ingredients:

2 cups pre-washed spinach

A few sprigs of parsley

1 granny smith apple

1 bartlett pear

Juice of half a lemon

1 inch of ginger

Ice cubes

Directions:

Throw everything into a blender. I recommend removing core from apple and pear and removing the skin from the ginger unless you have a blender that can grind those things up. And I would keep these ingredients handy for after Christmas. And New Years.