Green smoothies are the name of the game today. Funny-lookin’? Oh ja. Delicious? You betcha.
Let’s kick it off with my top 5 reasons you should make this smoothie:
5. It’s vegan.
4. It’s silky smooth from the avocado.
3. It’s like horchata, but healthy!
2. “Horchata” is fun to say.
1. And the number one reason you should make this smoothie is… {drum roll please} that you will get it all to yourself because it is green and gloppy but secretly delicious.
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If you’re vegan, I’m willing to bet you’ve made banana ice cream before. You know, the magical kind made with nothing but frozen bananas that is somehow amazingly similar to dairy ice cream? I used to make it frequently, but after a while it slipped off my radar (once I got an ice cream maker, probably). However, Nate requested it again recently and I couldn’t believe how long it had been since I whipped some up!
Plain banana ice cream is pretty good, but I like mine best with a tablespoon or two of nut butter and cocoa powder. It’s so good, you’d swear you paid $6 for a tiny pint of it, not made it yourself out of bananas that were ripened beyond recognition.
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So I’ve finally made the acquaintance of harissa. For the last year, I’ve seen other bloggers making delicious spicy recipes with this spice blend I’d never heard of. I kept vowing to try it… then returning to my lazy, familiar ways. But a little tub of it caught my eye at the farmer’s market on Martha’s Vineyard, and I knew I’d regret it if I procrastinated further. Plus, who doesn’t like to come home with some foodie souvenirs from their travels?
As it turns out, I probably should have left the harissa, because I spent my last cash on it. When Nate and I went to apply for our marriage license minutes later, neither of us had the $4 that it cost, thanks to his farmer’s market coffee and my harissa purchase. We actually had to ask my dad for $5 to apply for the license! Now there’s a story for our kids – Mommy and Daddy were so poor they couldn’t even afford to get married for $4. It’s kind of romantic, right? (We can leave out the part that Mommy had just paid more than that for a gourmet spice blend and Daddy was feeding his expensive latte habit.) That’ll teach me to walk past the ATM on my way out of the airport…
It was the harissa dip I sampled at the farmer’s market stand that put me over the edge towards buying it. That dip, made with yogurt and cream cheese, was nothing like this one, but I wanted to try out the harissa and carrot combination I’d seen all over the blogosphere. Also, Nate read The China Study while we were on the Vineyard, and he’s convinced me we should try to be a liiittle more vegan again. (Although I probably had you fooled with Monday’s recipe, which contained three types of dairy and an egg.) In any case, a carrot dip seemed like a good place to start with making a dent in my new tub of harissa.
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My brain is exploding with Asian flavors recently, in case you haven’t noticed. Tofu and sesame and ginger, oh my!
Well, no tofu in this one. That was Monday. Today we mostly have a whole lotta avocados!
This recipe was actually inspired by the Asian slaw stuffed avocados I posted last week. Between taking pictures, I was pouring leftover liquid from the slaw over the bits of avocado I’d scooped out when it hit me – ASIAN GUACAMOLE. I googled it immediately and while I wasn’t the first one to think of it, that’s practically impossible anyway. I was just looking for validation that this idea that had come out of my brain wasn’t going to be disgusting. Usually, if I google a recipe idea and get no results, it means 100,000 bloggers have tried it before me and decided it wasn’t worth posting about.
That is definitely not the case here. And while I’m not the first one in the history of mankind to make an Asian guacamole recipe, I bet your friends will be pretty impressed with your creativity when you show up at a party with this.
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Well well well, what do we have here?
Lettuce filled with tofu, that’s what. Can you get more vegan?
Well, maybe if I had also incorporated kale and quinoa. Then these could be eeeven more granola.
As it is, I feel like just the idea of tofu turns some people off. But no longer, because just LOOK at this tofu:
No matter your general feelings on tofu, come on. This stuff looks good.
This is definitely a tofu recipe for tofu haters.
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