Wednesday 24 January 2007

Smoothie operator


Not that you'd think so from the fine figure of a man that I am (see the pic on the right if you don't believe me - but don't believe the strangely pointed head that I appear to own - it's not like that at all. And the pic on the left isn't me at all. Honest.), but my diet is pretty appalling. Cigarettes supply me with most of my vitamins and minerals, thank God, otherwise I'd be dead. And vitamin pills provide the rest. I seem to be surviving on a diet of chocolate, coffee, tea, microwave ready-meals (which probably contain a lot of energy, due to the fact that they soak up microwaves) and lots of jacket potatoes with cheese, mayo and toasted sunflower seeds, along with beans on toast (with added Marmite and cheese) and peanut butter (with added Marmite) on toast.

Oh, actually, that doesn't look too bad, does it. Well, apart from the almost complete absence of those vegetable and fruit things.

Having found myself being sucked into the weird, faecal world of hamster-woman 'Doctor' Gillian McKeith (oh, that's who the picture on the left is) the other night, I thought: 'OK, let's try a few fruit and veg, just to see if they give me boundless energy and the skin of a 16 year-old (available on ebay, I would imagine). '
So I went, with typical Michalowski class, to Lidl today and spent ten or fifteen quid on an assortment of brown, green, red, orange and other unnaturally-coloured items that normally I would sooner shove up my bum than down my throat. The plan, you see, is to turn them into smoothies and soups. So - basically - I don't have to actually taste any of the viler ones. Actually, that's not quite true: when faced with fruit that I've actually bought, I can quite happily eat most of it (as I did back in 2005 when I got hepatitis A and couldn't eat any fat for several months - the amount of fresh fruit I got through was obscene, and probably contributed to the shade of custard yellow that I turned). But vegetables are Satan's Turds, and I've sworn never to allow most of them to pass my lips - in solid form, at least.
So, armed with the products of a small smallholding, me and Mike spent an hour or so this evening liquidising, simmering, chopping (and washing up. Never forget that - making smoothies and soups requires a ridiculous amount of washing up: God knows what our carbon footprint is now. It would probably have been more environmentally friendly to have flown to Rio de Janeiro to drink smoothies there).
And the end result?
Well, the soup that Mike made (containing butternut squash - always a favourite of Our Gillian - onions, carrots, potatoes, garlic and, erm, some others) was nice but needed a bit of salt or some herbs (yeuch!) or something to give it real bite.
The smoothies I made (one with orange juice and one with peach juice as a base, along with various selections of pomegranate seeds, kiwi fruits, bananas, carrotts and grapes) were lovely, if suspiciously similar-tasting ie the orange juice-based ones tasted very orangey, and the peach juice-based ones very peachy). I think I need strawberries and raspberries and blueberries and, well, lots of berries basically, to create a variety. It's fun, but we need a bigger liquidiser. I'm planning on making big batches and freezing them (although, apparently, frozen banana ones go brown). And a bigger freezer.
So next time you see me, take a close look: if I have the skin of a 16 year-old, either the fruit'n'veg are working, or I've been on ebay.
Mxx

11 comments:

Mags said...

As Mrs Smith told me a while back, try apple juice as a base.

I just use a hand blender to smoosh mine though, none of this fancy kit.

Mark Michalowski said...

Oooh, will do! Might let the flavours of the other fruits through a bit better. And we've got a hand-blendery-whooshy thing - should try it.

Mxx

Stuart Douglas said...

After yet another week riddled with some virus which apparenlty should only be able to infect mayflies and other creatures with no immune system, my doctor has told me to give up smoking, eat less 'Scottish' food and try a vegetable or piece of fruit for the first time since I was 10.

J and the kids love all that veg and fruit stuff, so they've been making me smoothies all week - do they all have to taste so bloody sickly though?

Is there no such thing as, I don't know, a vitamin packed pork chop and roast potatoes smoothie? Preferably one you could drink in quite small quantities in order that it doesn't impact quite so much on my usual caffiene and tannine imbued drinks?

Mark Michalowski said...

God, I wish! Already the novelty's wearing off, but I've got half a dozen bottles of fruity muck in the freezer, two papayas, two kiwi fruits and two pomegranates left, so the pain isn't over yet. Particularly the gurgle, farty pain I got in my stomach last week, just after I'd started on this lark. Hmph!

Mxx

IZP said...

Carrot and orange with a sprinkle of ginger's the one. Careful with the gurgly pain, or your Wetworld may emerge sooner than expected...

SAF said...

Just felt compelled to say, what a bright, wonderful - and very pink! - place your blog is. Unfortunately, I have no advice to offer - except to give the poor sixteen year old his or her skin back. :)

Mags said...

Carrot and ginger soup is yummy - I made it a couple of weeks back but didn't think to note down the quantities. I think it's a ratio of about 1 to 3 ginger to carrots, plus veggie stock (2 carrots and 400ml stock makes enough soup for one).

Mark Michalowski said...

Ugh! Ginger!! Ugh ugh ugh! Although, having said that, Tesco's lemon cheesecake with a ginger base is very lovely. Plain orange and carrot smoothies are OK, actually (and they *feel* very healthy) although I think we overdid the carrots the other day and it was all a bit, um, 'rustic'. Mike's tastebuds are broken: he's tasting carrot in everything, even when it's not there.

Mxx

IZP said...

Our Gill's just been officially de-Doctored, it said so on popular Leeds breakfast show You and Yours.
Someone I know had mates worked on her show. Apparently there's a very fine art to filming her so she doesn't look like a mad hunchbacked dwarf.

Mags said...

That's her after the camera trickery? Yeepers.

Mark Michalowski said...

And did you know that she seems to have some sort of OCD? One programme, when she stayed overnight at one of her victims' houses, they showed her cleaning her teeth or something, and she was wiping the taps with a tissue or cloth or something. Like she was scared of germs. And she brought her own bedding.

Creepy.

Mxx