Green Smoothies and Caramelly Appleness

We're at T minus 26 days, people. It's going to be a close race to this finish line, let me tell you.

Doing double duty in the quest to complete the list: the green smoothie. It's one of my 40 new recipes (almost done there), and in theory it could help me to finish well in the approaching-a-healthy-weight vein of things.

The green smoothie (also "Shrek smoothie," "Monster smoothie," "Hulk smoothie," and "Eeew-Mommy-what-is-that?") looks a little freaky. I'll give you that. Here's the picture I saw on Pinterest that led me to the recipe:
I'm a sucker for a great photo. Also this shade of green, which you may remember is not far off the color of my living and dining room walls. I read up on the green smoothie phenomenon, and it's supposed to be an easy, filling solution for breakfast, lunch, or a snack...not to mention seriously good for you.

I had one yesterday for breakfast, another this morning, and a third a little while ago for a late lunch. Here's my less-than-gorgeous photo of the first one:
To make it I threw the following into a blender:

1 banana
about 1 cup frozen peach slices
about 1/2 cup frozen pineapple chunks
a little water...maybe 1/2 cup, but I always end up needing to add more
1 big handful baby spinach leaves

My ancient blender didn't enjoy this task. I ended up having to use the handle of a rubber spatula to sort of gingerly push the stuff down into the blades. While it was running. My mother would have been horrified. (Please note: obviously, you should try to avoid sticking things into the whirling blender. I'm sort of an idiot.)

It did eventually do the job, though, and I have to say that the website was right: it's delicious (I genuinely cannot detect a spinach taste), filling, and easy. I'm not sure how to gauge the amount of energy it's giving me, but I do know that I'm getting a WHOLE lot more vitamins and minerals than I otherwise would have.

I'm wondering what might happen if I had these for breakfast and lunch for a week. I don't know what the odds are that I'd be able to pull that off, but I wonder.

All of this uber-healthiness helps to counteract some of the other cooking I've been doing. I've been on an apple-caramel kick for a while, and that yielded caramel apple cheesecake bars, which: ohmygoodness. I didn't take any pictures, but here's a photo from the recipe page.
Yeah.

I brought these to an end-of-summer party at the home of my friend Kathy (who kept me running) and her husband, Piscataway Joe. They met with lots of enthusiasm. The bars, I mean. Though Joe and Kathy are fantastic, too.

Under the same apple-caramel compulsion, I also tried caramel apple cookies. Yum.


I left the nuts off the top. They were really soft--kind of like a cross between a cookie and a muffin--but really nice, especially with the frosting. My kids approved.

During this interval we also tried cinnamon swirl pancakes. Because I apparently cannot pass up an opportunity to cram my children full of sugar.

I put together a cinnamon-sugar-butter syrupy thing (full disclosure: I think I messed with that part of the recipe, but I don't remember how) that I was supposed to put in a squirt bottle. I had no squirt bottle, so I dug out an old baby bottle and snipped off the end. It looks a little disturbing filled with brown liquid...like seeing an infant drinking coffee or Dr. Pepper.
You can follow their pancake recipe or just use your favorite, then swirl the cinnamon syrup over the batter.

The pics I saw on the web had that same brown swirl in the finished pancakes, but when I flipped mine, the butter and sugar melted and crusted up over the whole surface, leaving a swirly pattern where they had been. I am not complaining.


As you may have guessed, these don't really need syrup, though the buttermilk syrup featured in the recipe looks intriguing.

We also tried a couple of snacks. One was an experiment for Rosh Hashanah (or was it Yom Kippur?), when the kids were out of school and it was miserable and rainy out. We tried chocolate chip mug cake:
...topped with ice cream.
These were sort of meh. They're a great idea--mix up a few ingredients in a mug and stick it in a microwave--but they brought me back to the 80's when we were all like, "Look! You can bake in the microwave!" until the novelty wore off and we realized that everything we baked in the microwave was kind of like a dense, sticky sponge.

The ice cream helped, but Joy declared that given the choice between this snack and plain vanilla ice cream, she'd take the plain ice cream. No one finished it. Still, it could scratch an itch for something warm and sweet in a pinch. I'm hanging on to the recipe.

There have been a couple more experiments of late (barbecued baby back ribs, au gratin potatoes, and maybe more), but the only other one for which I have a photo is the soft pretzels. It was an after-school snack and was a huge hit.

I followed the recipe faithfully (it happens once in a while), and these were fabulous and buttery and much like an Auntie Anne's or some such mall pretzel. My only difficulty was that while they were perfect on top and inside, the bottoms burned. My friend Kathy tells me I should bake them on something a little gentler (like a pizza stone or airbake pan, or maybe just some added layers of foil or parchment) to keep that from happening. But I sliced the burned parts off, and what was left was gone very quickly.

There's more to tell. I'm going to try to write less bulk and more often as we're in the home stretch here!