Exciting Plants

After all of my sister's lectures, books, and scientific articles, I'm not sure if I can fully convert to veganism or even vegetarianism (bacon srsly), but I have become fascinated by vegan baking and meals, just because I do agree that reducing meat intake is important and I don't know, it's just interesting to see how many "normal" foods can taste delicious with some veggie substitutions.

First of all, the green smoothie! Yes, I'm one of those people who drinks strange tasting GREEN concoctions and gets excited over them.

But honestly, why would you not be excited? This is a way to eat those veggies (and eat them raw, which is even better) and even some ground flax seeds and hardly notice. Also I might be alone in this, but I actually like the green coloring- it's very fresh and energizing, just like the actual smoothie. To hear about this more elonquently, check out Green Smoothie Revolution and Oh, She Glows, for starters.

Yes, I have heard about oxalates causing kidney stones, but I put literally obscene amounts of spinach in my sandwiches and ate them five days a week for almost all of my senior year in high school, so blending them into smoothies doesn't dramatically increase my intake. However, I'm not a health practitioner and I don't drink these smoothies every day (just because I'm lazy/don't feel like it/don't have spinach), so I'm not the expert. And obviously if you have a history of kidney stones be wary with these.

There are lots of recipes floating around on the internet, but for this particular smoothie, I just used one banana, one orange, one very large handful of spinach, and some ground flax seeds, almond milk, and ice. This is pretty much my go-to recipe because we almost always have bananas and oranges at home.

Secondly, I made some amazing, almost vegan, faux-Magnums (once again, I failed at being completely vegan because I used regular chocolate to make the coating, but this was extremely exciting regardless).

These are honestly one of the most amazing things I've made this summer. They don't taste vegan or healthy at all, and they taste like an indulgent treat but are pretty healthy, even by non-ice cream standards. Admittedly they're not quite low-fat because of the almond butter, but since most of almond fat is mono- or polyunsaturated, I don't count it as fat (for the record, I am not a dieter, I just don't like unhealthy fats. If you're on a diet, don't immediately listen to me when I talk about how healthy a desert is, because I don't pay attention to calorie counts). The coating was much easier to cover the ice-cream with than I expected, and it hardened enough to hold its shape upon contact with the ice-cream (although I did put it in the freezer for a few minutes to let it properly re-solidify). You wouldn't even know that the "ice-cream" was only made of bananas, almond butter, and cocoa powder. I know I'm gushing about these a lot and that my picture doesn't show off just how amazing it is (I really need a new popsicle mold), but check out the original recipe and picture and MAKE THESE. You won't regret it.