Summer 2011, Day 2: Strawberry Smoothie Love

To Whom May Read This Blog...

As you probably all know, I'm Sophie. The reason why we didn't do our Kid's Cooking Challenge over the school year is because we were really busy. But now it's summer so we're starting it up again.

I started by going to a Califoria Strawberry convention where I learned all about strawberries and how to use them and what's in them. They're pretty amazing because they actually carry a lot of vitamin C, antioxidents, and fiber. I know we're doing Ellie Krieger this summer for our cooking challenge, but I wanted to sort of make my own, using the California Strawberry Cookbook.

The smoothie was really easy and quick. Like usual, we didn't have all the ingredients, so I improvised. We didn't have strawberry juice, plain yogurt, basil leaves (we had them, but I didn't want to add that or the pepper spice). What I did instead was I put in some frozen mangos, strawberries, a cup and a half of ice, some milk, and some strawberry yogurt.

Then I pureed it in the blender. A dietician, who is a guy-etician since he's a guy and most dieticians are women, I guess, said a smoothie is a good lunch or breakfast...or even dinner.

It was a really easy recipe. You just put it all into a blender and puree. It was really tasty and it fills you. And it was very healthy. No ice cream. No presercatives. And I learned that if you freeze fruit, or buy frozen fruit, you don't actually lose much of the good stuff. There's still a lot of good stuf in the fruit, or vegetables, too.

I give this 2 thumbs up, and will make this again.

PS, my oldest brother, who's very particular about his smoothies, said this was a very good smoothie. He thought there were bananas in it, but I said no, they were mangos.

I suggest you feed this to your family.

This is the book by the Guy-etician, David Grotto.

Day 74 - Stewed Fruit and Crumble

Recipe from Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution and Jamie Online

Hi, hi, everyone. It's 9:15 and my mom just got home from a book signing. I cooked at, like, 4:00 this afternoon, but now it's past my bedtime, so we're writing a quick post.

Today I made stewed fruit and Crumble. I used plums and a pear which we got from the food co-op yesterday. I'd never made stewed fruit before, but I have made a little crumble before.

This was a very easy recipe. It took about 30 minutes. A little bit more if you do the crumble. It's sort of like an apple sauce, almost, except we used the pear and plums. It was chunky. Stewing fruit is not as easy as it looks. You have to cut all the fruit, which is weird because you really notice the texture of the fruit.

It was juicy. You just cook it with a little water and sugar.

I used sugar in the raw, which my dad uses for his coffee.

When it's done, the fruit is very hot.

You add the crumble topping and then bake it. The crumble topping is just flour, sugar, butter, and oats (we used GF Bisquick).

The crumble topping

I had to get the skin out!

I only had a taste because it's not our dessert night. Yesterday was dessert night. Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday are dessert nights. I think we're a healthy family because we don't eat dessert all the time and we don't go to fast food places.

1 1/2 THUMBS UP

I would have liked it a little less chunky. But it was good.

Day 51 - Stewed Fruit, Minus the Stewing, with Yogurt

Recipe from Jamie's Food Revolution, and then we changed it

Well, it's day 51 and we made it past day 50 (hence the day 51). To celebrate, we went to the movies at around 6:00. We saw The Karate Kid, which is a good movie... you should see it.

By the time we got home, it was after 9:00 so we needed something quick and easy. We made Stewed Fruit, Minus the Stewing, with Yogurt. I made a parfait. I put some vanilla yogurt on the bottom of one of those elegant, fancy-shmancy dishes for ice cream and stuff. Then I layered it with some cut strawberries. You can do this with any type of fruit or multiple types of fruit. And really, to follow this recipe, you should stew it, which means just cooking it with some stuff in it. I'm not really sure what you stew it in since I didn't do it this time. I will try actually stewing, sometime. Eventually. In the near future. Maybe.

This is our homemade granola, the Jamie Oliver recipe, too!

Then you put some more yogurt, and some more yogurt. Then you top it with some granola, or strawberries and granola, or you can just use oats.

It tasted good. I might have eaten all of it, but I stuffed my face with movie theater popcorn. Even though it's not healthy, I give into temptations once in a while, so don't blame yourself if you do that. Just make sure it's not 20 donuts.

1 7/8 THUMBS UP (because 2 THUMBS UP is getting too predictable!)

Thank you, and good night. Literally.

Day 9 - Fruit Smoothy

Cookbook - Jamie's Food Revolution

Today is Sunday and we made a smoothy. It's a mix and match smoothy. The recipe calls for different stuff. You can do different kinds of frozen fruits and then it's just kind of what you like. It says to use plain yogurt, but we didn't have any so we used vanilla yogurt.

The weird thing is that it calls for oats. The oats slows down the sugar from the fruits going into your blood so it doesn't rush through your body all at once. You can also put in nuts. You can also add honey to bring out the flavor of the strawberrries or the bananas if you can't taste it that well.

I didn't like the graininess of the oats, but we used steel cut oats. We were supposed to use regular oats. So with steel cuts oats it was grainy and I give it 1 THUMB UP.

But if you use regular oats, I probably would have liked it a lot better. I'll try it again another day with regular oats--not today, some other time--and see how many thumbs up I'll give it.