Book review: Clean Eating Smoothie Recipes — plant based and delicious, by Way of Life Press
You can blame the following on L. Jay Mozdy.
My latest nutrient preparation problem is the normal usual one that isolated people usually normally have at around 7 in the morning and that’s: The Poor Mango Conversion Coefficient. The issue is that, unlike grapes and strawberries, mangos are difficult to eat as a solid fruit because there’s this big, flat stone running through them like a submerged starship and, when you try to get any edible bits off, mostly it separates into a bowl with a sort of tagliatelle mess of rind with oily mush hanging off it and another bowl with a huge, flat stone with fruit pulp that obstinately refuses to be chipped, gnawed, scraped or otherwise sucked off of the surface. The stone is the same squashed oval shape as the plane Blackbird, but without the wings, and leaks just as much, so mango kind of proves evolution over intelligent design. Anyway, this leaves us with a critical workaround situation. Sliced mangos in tins taste horrible, clothy and slimy, so unpleasantness is not an option before you get to work. Sliced peaches are good, but mangos — yukkitty yukface yuk. Okay, so I saw this interview with David Suchet (who played Poirot) and he said that the Duke of Edinburgh told him that the way to eat a mango is to slice around the hemisphere divider then slip a large spoon through the slice and over the stone, then wiggle the spoon until it separates, lift the section off, then cup the outer rind and cross-slice the inside pulp into a square grid with a fruit knife, then turn the half of a fruit inside out so all the little dices pop up and can be eaten without any mess. I tried this, twice, and made so much mess all over me that I had to change my clothes. Picture a foam party. I’m sure you could master this technique if you were prepared to spend two years in a lamasery up a Tibetan foothill with prayer flags slapping away at your attempts to concentrate, but time is of the essence because it’s now 7.03. Fine, so that leaves the alternative of mango as a liquid, which is a substance I could survive on for quite a long time if there was someone waiting outside with a hatchet. The taste is perfect, it has none of the artificiality of Vimto/added sugar/polyoccyfloffysuturates, and the texture is magically no longer clothy and oily. What’s the problem then? Buy cartons of mango juice, silly. Well, that gets a bit samey, doesn’t it? Some brands aren’t as good as others (compare Rubicon with Del Monte). What I’d really like to do is convert a plump mango I’ve selected from a fruit shop, with just the right balance of green to red, not too firm, not too squashy, an approving smile from the connoisseur at the counter, into a liquid food that’s fit for human consumption and where I can actually harvest a high proportion of edible material from the fruit, instead of trying to wipe slop off my lap with an unsuitable spoon and a cross expression. Therefore, I have bought a copy of Clean Eating Smoothie Recipes — plant based and delicious, by Way of Life Press. My 7am decision-making method involves wider critical hoops than my 4pm decision-making process and only now do I see that this book apparently has no author at all, which is troubling me now because it’s an abdication of responsibility and this could turn out to be a cleverly disguised commercial vehicle for the lychee and saw-grass lobby, damn them all to compostry with their reusable straws. Okay, maybe I’ve gone too deep down this rabbit hole and should backstep to jacket potatoes or spinach in puff pastry flatties with feta or a little piece of yam [what do you do with the rest of the yam, they’re humongous?]. I could also get so worked up about this that I forget to eat, which is what I usually do when I have a panic, unless someone points out it’s not healthy to want to fit through your own letterbox. Having written this, it’s about 8 o’clock and I’ll do my emails and drop the subject until lunch when I have to work out what will compliment my foil-wrapped Dairylea triangle, the staple fall-back of reality cuisine. I wonder if I would muck up melba toast? Hey, I’ve written a book review before reading the book! Everyone else is so linear. Did I tell you I’ve got a responsible job? Well I have. At the moment.
Thirty minutes later… I’ve now read this thin ebook and it has recipes for Sweet greens smoothie (melon etc); Guava smoothie (interesting); Cranberry greens smoothie (I can only get dried cranberries here); Apricot green smoothie (definitely yes); Kalette green smoothie (whatsatt?); Lemon celery and cucumber smoothie (take a walk on the wild side); Cinnamon cantaloupe smoothie (out of my comfort zone, so I’ll pass); Pineapple green smoothie (sounds interesting); Mango banana smoothie (now you’re talkin’); Blueberry romaine smoothie (sounds sour); Apple avocado smoothie (how to ruin an apple); lemon spinach smoothie (a chance to try alien food); Chocolate banana smoothie (sounds cloggy); Almond carrot smoothie (hmmm, original combination); and Cherry vanilla smoothie (yes, I’m going to make this one first). You can’t go wrong with mango, cherry and cracked almonds, I guess. I’m going to award this little resource a rating based on the useful text and improving my intake of vitamins, but may conceivably come back to adjust that to a 3 if the output gives me a knotted stomach and Kalette turns out to be a country and western singer.
