The Best Green Smoothies on the Planet: The 150
Most Delicious, Most Nutritious, 100% Vegan Recipes for the World's Healthiest
Drink by Tracy Russell
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Review:
Best Green Smoothies is more than a collection of
smoothie recipes. Russell is a hardcore believer in a whole food vegan diet,
and green smoothies are an important component of that lifestyle. All the
recipes in this book are vegan, which means they don't contain milk or yogurt
or any other animal products. That separates this book from many others on the
market.
This book begins with an explanation of the
benefits of green smoothies, including how this is a convenient way to eat more
fruits and vegetables without having to spend half the day gnawing on raw kale.
Russell also offers instruction on how to make a basic green smoothie (include
one "base" fruit, one "flavor" fruit, liquid, and greens)
and even how to fix a smoothie that turned out badly.
To call Best Green Smoothies a cookbook would be
inaccurate, since all the ingredients are raw. The only appliance in use here
is a blender, the choice of which Russell does discusses early in the book. It
turns out not all blenders are created equal. To characterize this as a diet
book would also be incorrect. Russell doesn't advocate replacing all meals with
smoothies or going on a smoothie fast. Although there are sections of the book
dedicated to different types of smoothies, including detox varieties, Russell points
out that any radical diet is doomed to fail. Instead it's better to gradually
switch to a healthy diet of whole foods that includes green smoothies, and this
will lead to greater health and fitness.
You might be wondering at this point whether a
vegan smoothie recipe tastes good. I had the same question, so I decided to
give one a try. The Super Antioxidant Blast Green Smoothie sounded like a good
choice because it called for pomegranate and banana, both of which I had in the
house. It also called for 3 cups of baby spinach, which I didn't have. So the
first substitution was two cups of organic kale, which I had purchased in case
I wanted to try the smoothie book. The recipe also called for one pouch of
frozen acai puree. I don't know what that is, and I couldn't even ask at the
grocery store because I can't pronounce acai. So I substituted extra
pomegranate and hoped it was something like acai.
The smoothie turned out okay, under the
circumstances. First, I mixed the fruits and it looked dark pink from the
pomegranate. Then I threw in one cup of the kale and everything turned an icky
gray color. So I threw in the other cup of kale and everything turned green,
which was way better than gray. The taste was all right, especially since I had
feared the kale would be overwhelming. It wasn't; the banana was. So I threw in
a splash of vanilla extract, which made things better, but the banana was still
omnipresent.
Russell prefers smoothies to be room temperature,
but that sounded unappealing, so I refrigerated all my ingredients before
blending and threw in a couple ice cubes. Also, the texture might have been
improved if I'd been using a more powerful blender. My blender is more than 20
years old and dates from when my now-husband and I got our first place
together. Probably a more powerful blender manufactured in this millennium would
have done a better job crushing the pomegranate seeds. There was also a
psychological hurdle here. I'm not a vegan or even a vegetarian, so making a
smoothie using just water without milk or yogurt felt wrong. Certainly this
wouldn't be an issue for a vegan, however.
My plan is to try another smoothie tomorrow and
substitute an apple for the banana. I must make another smoothie tomorrow
because I've still got a fridge full of kale. A bunch of it cost 99 cents at
Kroger, and it's too hard and leafy to eat on its own without blending it.
Speaking of extra kale, this book had the same problem
as most recipe books, namely it calls for a little bit of a lot of different
ingredients, and then you're stuck with the leftover ingredients. For instance,
a number of recipes here call for ¼ of an avocado. What do you do with the
remaining ¾ ? Once you're full of veggie smoothie, you might not be in the mood
to eat the majority of an avocado, and it tends to turn brown in the fridge. If
you need one stalk of celery, what should you do with the rest? And where do
you get only one tablespoon of chia seeds? Don't even get me started on the mountain
of kale lurking in my fridge as I write this. It's like a rainforest in there.
Aside from this complaint that I have with nearly
every recipe book ever written, The Best Green Smoothies offers a lot of great
ideas in an easy-to-digest format. Bon appétit!
Reviewed by Peter
