My First... GREEN Shake?

I've been reading about these 'green shakes' people have been concocting and drinking for about a year or so now and while my interest was peaked, I must admit, I wasn't too excited to jump on this bandwagon.  You see, I'm not a very big veggie lover.  Oh, I do like some... potatoes (mashed and swimming in butter), corn (on the cob and also swimming in butter), peas (ever ate those cooked in butter?), carrots (cooked only!), iceberg lettuce (along with lots of other things in my salad to cover up the taste)... you get the point.

The thing that intrigued me about these shakes is that these people were getting in their green veggies and claiming they couldn't even taste them!  I was very skeptical about that part.  When you've made up your mind that you don't like something you will swear to the death that you can taste that particular item in a recipe!  Yet, the more I read, and the more I kept asking, "Are you SURE you can't taste those green veggies?!" and getting the same overwhelming response, the more I began to think that this just might be THE way for me to get those all-important green veggies in that I've been avoiding for the past 34 years of my life!

So I scoured the internet to find a recipe that I thought I could handle and decided to go with this one.  I mean, come on.  She's a fellow homeschool mom.  I have to support her, right?  Besides, when I read that her number one reason for drinking these green shakes was for ENERGY I knew I had to try them!

So I dug out my blender and got to work, tweaking Crystal's recipe above just a little.  I threw in a banana, some frozen strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries, a peeled Granny Smith apple, half of a peeled ornage, and some organic spinach (!) <---- I'm still shocked at myself over that.

When I turned on the blender... nothing happened.  It all just sat there.  Now, I'm sure that has to be due to using my 1972 mustard-yellow blender instead of one of the newer 'heavy duty' ones (which is now going on my Christmas list!), but after I added a little splash of orange juice everything blended up nicely.

Except...

Umm, my 'green' shake turned out pink!  My favorite color!  Oh well.  I'm sure that will change as I get brave and up the greens to fruit ratio.

And the result?  It tasted like...

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Strawberries!  No yucky spinach taste what-so-EVER!  I even verified this result by having 3 of my 4 kiddo's taste it (the fourth doesn't like strawberries) and they agreed! 

Now, I'm not a big strawberry fan (unless they're dipped in chocolate!), so I'm going to have to play around with the ingredients, but overall I'm very proud of myself!  Never in my life have I eaten spinach, nor that many servings of fruit in one day!  I think this could make getting healthier MUCH easier!  (Believe it or not, I DO really like V-8, so I'd like to find a recipe that would mimic that also.)

So, if you're like me and not a big veggie lover but know you really need to find a way to get them into your diet you just might want to try your own pink, er, I mean, GREEN shake.  I promise, you CAN'T taste the veggies!

(Here's another website that has some good, basic info on green shakes.)