Help! There's Something Green In My Blender!

Gotta love Pinterest.  You find a pretty picture and find fantastic promises about it underneath- and because someone wrote it, it must be true.  Loose all your belly fat with this five-minute workout five days a week!  Break open a glow stick in a jar with glitter and you get fairy dust!  A 2-ingredient meal that takes one minute that your family will love!

I admit being duped by the fairy dust, and a red-white-and-blue layered 4th of July Drink that turned into a muddy purple, so have come to be a little bit cautious about their claims. 

When I decided to try to make friends with vegetables last week, there was a bag full of spinach in my fridge which triggered me to remember that I had a pin with a Grinchy-green smoothie on it.  I looked it up, and it instructed me to "drink this every day and watch the pounds just slide right off! Gives you so much energy!  I LOVE green smoothies!"  I half-believed one of those statements.  The one about the energy.  Certainly not the one about loving green smoothies, that couldn't be right.

The one time I had a bite of seaweed-wrapped sushi, all I could think of was "sick, this tastes like SEAWEED!" and I dry-heaved.  More than once.  At the table.  At a formal church benefit dinner.  After Charlie was born, in hopes of getting my breastmilk to come in, I mixed this mega-vitamin Yelixir crap into flavored water and chugged it down three times a day.  The lactation consultant told me it would taste "green."  It tasted like a cross between cabbage and grass and  I ha. ted. it.   I still can't drink any flavored water without gagging.

So the idea of drinking a green smoothie was not appealing.  But the Pinterest promise of more energy was a bit tempting, and I liked the other ingredients, which were not green:  applesauce, orange juice, a banana, five strawberries, and a cup of yogurt.  The green part was 2 handfuls of spinach.  Groan...handfuls? Plural?  I pretended to have tiny little porcelain doll hands and gingerly dropped the spinach into the blender, piled high with fruit.

Okay, I admit it.  It looked kind of pretty.

Until I blended it together.  It was the color of ectoplasm, or the boogers you have on your sixth day of a cold, or moss - which was precisely what I expected it to taste like.

I put a pretty straw in it to make myself feel a little better about drinking it.

I am thrilled to say that not only was I able to drink this stuff, I didn't gag, and- hold onto your plants- I liked it.  I liked it!  If it were in a cup that wasn't clear, I would have thought you handed me a plain 'ol fruit smoothie.  Can't taste the spinach at all.  In fact, I've had one every day for the past three days, and my boys love it too.  I'm sure I've lost at least 45 pounds so far drinking spinach smoothies, because Pinterest said I would so it must be true.  I LOVE green smoothies!