blendeds

A few years ago I went on a major juicing kick. I was juicing anything I could get my hands on. Beet greens, kale, spinach, peppers, lots of lemons. Apples and carrots and ginger. Oh my. It was great. Once I even juiced whole beets and then gulped down the sweet blood before I realized that it’s not so smart to drink three cups of pure beet juice. Apparently your heart can just spontaneously stop beating. Imagine that: death by nectar.

In any case, I was obsessed. But here’s the rub: juice is delicious, but not really all that cost effective. You get all the goodness—vitamins up the wazoo—but you toss out the stuff that really fills you up, all that fibrous tangled goodness. The point at which I did this cost-benefit analysis just happened the moment when I was at a dinner with some friends and an old hippie pal of theirs named Pierce told me how he gets around this problem. “I blend. I don’t juice.” Now, I thought, Pierce looks pretty good for a hard-workin’ guy in his 60s. So I decided that when he unveiled his method, I’d add a little spin of my own and begin blending. Blending salads, that is.

I met my foodie boyfriend J about this same time, just after I had perfected my method. I think I told him about blending on the first date. I might as well have been describing the slow torture of his family cat; he looked pained, confused, his squinched eyebrows practically overlapping. Here’s what I told him: you take a head of lettuce (preferably romaine), put it in a blender, add two whole carrots, a cucumber, one green pepper, a ripe tomato (stem removed), some celery, a handful of mint, the juice of one or two lemons, a cored green apple, and really anything else you have in the crisper. And then you just blend the hell out of it. It comes out as this muddy green slop that if you drink quickly enough, you hardly realize how good it doesn’t taste. And you’re all filled up with three days worth of greens and basically no fat. I lost seven pounds—at a time when that was a significant reduction in my body weight—in my first week of blending. It was brilliant, if a bit gross. The real problem was that I needed to be near a blender everyday and I needed to keep a ton of greenery around. I gave it up as soon as J started proving that it was possible to eat well and have it taste good. Imagine that.

Fast forward a couple years. I have a new invention. It’s called salad-in-a-bag. This time it’s the goodness of a blended without the blend. You take a head of lettuce, chop it up, wash it, put it in a ziplock. Then you repeat this process with any other vegetables on hand. Then you put the bag in your work sack and nibble on it all day, using your hands, not a utensil. There’s no mess because there’s no dressing. It’s just a bag of goodness. Then you try to avoid the slightly more delicious bag of pumpkin seeds that you also packed in said work bag. You give in.