Kale fruit smoothie

I’ve decided to try something different – to expand this blog to all sorts of endeavors, rather than keeping a narrow jewelry focus. Why? Mainly because, three and a half months into motherhood, I cast a much wider creative net, yet still really enjoy documenting my explorations, process, and self-development.

An alternative presentation: I haven’t learned to manage my time well enough as a caretaker to return to jewelry making – but I’m still doing stuff! And I want to talk about it!
So. Let’s see where this takes me.

Really, green smoothies were not my thing. Maybe still aren’t. Except, every week, for four months straight, we received an armful of curly kale as part of our summer CSA.
I tried salads. I added it to soup. I gave it away. I let some of it yellow and wilt in our fridge (and those of you who’ve stored kale know that it takes centuries for that to happen. Kidding. Sort of.)

One morning, feeling spurred by guilt over wasted vegetables and emboldened by a recipe on Pinterest, I added kale (a ton; all the kale ever) to an already planned banana-blueberry smoothie. It turned out this muddy eggplant color that quickly oxidized into beige (aka: fugly), but tasted nice. So I tweaked and fine-tuned to our taste, and now we regularly breakfast on the following recipe:

• 2 bananas (pretty ripe)
• 2 apples (I bet any are fine, but I’ve used gold delicious and pink ladies)
• 1 cup milk (we, still being really Russian in this regard, use whole milk)
• 2 cups orange juice
• ~ 5 oz frozen pineapple chunks
• a handful of roasted unsalted cashews (optional)
• 1-2 tbsp maple syrup (optional, to be added after tasting how the rest of ingredients mixed)
• kale, the trunk and veins removed (the more you put, the greener and grassier the resulting taste is; I use 1/3 of a $3.00 bunch purchased at the farmer’s market – or all that’s shown in the photo)

This yields about 7 cups of liquid, or 4 tall glasses, of a vivid spring green goodness.