The Great Green Smoothie

Detox, hydrate, and fuel up with this delicious green smoothie. Tart crisp apples, luscious melon, and a few other good-for-you ingredients make it a super choice for a great start to your day or after-workout rejuvenator. (Skip to recipe.)

Help. I've started the 30-day yoga challenge. (Kind of like Help me. I've fallen, and I can't get up.) I've committed. 30 days of yoga in a row.

Only 2 days done so far, and I have the sore muscles to prove it.

My fault entirely, since I haven't attended hot yoga in over a year. After a torn rotator cuff injury, I was taking physiotherapy all last summer. But now it's time to head back into it. I'm holding my breath and jumping right into the deep end.

I've missed hot yoga. I love the feeling of being in the sweltering, dimly-lit, steamy room, sweat dripping off me as if I'm in some kind of invisible shower - it's like being in a womb (weird analogy, I know) where I feel safe and insulated from the outside world. While I'm in that calm environment, twisting and contorting to the Downward Dog, the Pigeon, and the Warrior poses, I forget all about the worries that usually plague my mind.

I step inside the darkened studio, unroll my yoga mat, and lay down in the utterly relaxing shavasana pose, my mind empties, and I float into another space.    Ahhhhhhhh . . .

Slowly we start to move and stretch, first this body part, then the other. Even as the intensity increases and I feel the sweat beading, then trickling, then dripping off my body, I love it. I imagine the toxins flowing out with every salty drip. I drink a ton of water.

And if I'm organized enough, I make myself a cleansing and refueling green smoothie to sip before I go and then again after I'm finished . . . lots of minerals and antioxidants, alkalizing fruits, natural electrolyte coconut water, protein-rich hemp hearts. It's a detox in a jar.

*Off topic, but I need to share - Notice the gashes in the melon? That's my boys. I love them dearly, but ever since they were little, they've had this weird obsession with carving into fruits or vegetables in the fruit bowl or cutting 'designs' into the leaves of my house plants: apples with pinprick patterns, bananas with brown swirls scraped into the peels, plant leaves with Star Wars slogans scarred into them. It drives me absolutely bonkers crazy. And even though they're both long past the stage of calling themselves 'little' (one is 18 and one is 28!) - it seems they still cannot restrain themselves from cutting a quick little slice or gouge into a fruit, or carving a pattern into a banana, which doesn't show up until it turns brown, long after they've left the scene of the crime. I can never catch them in the act, but find the evidence later, when plant leaves scar into the designs they've carved, or sometimes even their brazen initials.

Anyone else have boys with this same infuriating affliction?

I think I'll have another sip of my delectable green smoothie, take some deep, calming breaths, and forget about the things that can make mothers crazy. I'm heading off to hot yoga.

Namaste!

* * * * *

The Great Green Smoothie Recipe

• 1 tart green apple (such as Granny Smith), preferably organic
• 3 cups diced sweet, ripe honeydew melon (¼ of a large one)
• ¼ cup (35gms) raw hemp hearts
• 1½ cups (50gms) raw spinach leaves
• 1 cup (240ml) coconut water (100% pure, no additives)
• juice of 1 - 1½ limes (2 - 3 tablespoons)

Quarter the apple and cut out the core. Place all the ingredients (start with the juice of 1 lime) in a high-speed blender and process until smooth. Taste, and add more lime juice if you think it needs more zip, then whiz for another couple seconds.

*If using a regular blender, you may need to peel the apple. Place the apple quarters, hemp hearts and coconut water into the blender and puree them first, then add the remaining ingredients, and puree until smooth.

Makes a generous 4 cups (1 litre), serving 2 (or one before-yoga smoothie and one for after!)

Guten Appetit!

 

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