Green Day

It's a cold, damp, cloudy Saturday afternoon and half of our family has a bad case of the fevery sniffles. A perfect day for hubby to surprise us all with a few brand new healthy recipes made in our brand new blender! Today's green menu included Creamy Spinach Avocado Soup and Popeye Ice Cream.

One great feature of the blender is that it can blend so quickly as to actually heat up soups. Veggies out of the fridge with cold water out of the tap resulted in steamy soup in a single step! The texture of the soup was very smooth and creamy, the flavors blended together beautifully, and it was very, very garlicky (which is never a bad thing when you have a bad cold!). If you don't have a comparable blender I'd imagine that you might be able to use a good food processor to blend everything together and then heat on a stove top, but I haven't tried that yet.

For desert, hubby used another option on the blender to make some one-step ice cream. The blade spins more slowly on this setting in order to blend the ice with a minimal amount of melting. A main ingredient in the ice cream is fresh spinach which made it a vibrant green color! Other than for the color I wouldn't have guessed that there was anything different in the homemade ice cream than the traditional ingredients of vanilla ice cream. The kids called it 'icy green slime' and loved their portions!


These recipes are adapted from the BlendTec cookbook.

Creamy Spinach Avocado Soup


Makes 2 large bowls of soup


Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups water
• 2 cups spinach
• 1 avocado
• 1 stalk celery
• 1 tsp cumin
• 1 tsp dry red pepper flakes
• 2 cloves garlic
• pinch salt

Blend all ingredients until steamy on the Soup setting. Garnish with additional chopped spinach, mushrooms or red peppers.

Popeye Ice Cream

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup cream, half and half, milk or milk substitute
• 1 scoop protein powder
• 2 tbsp honey (or sweetener of choice)
• 1 cup spinach
• ½ tsp vanilla
• 4 cups ice

Place all ingredients into the blender in the order listed and secure lid. Blend on the Ice Cream setting. Serve immediately or store in freezer.