Saturday, May 30, 2009

Final exams week or how to survive on cereal coffee, dark chocolate and biscuits




I must confess: my breakfasts have been not ideal breafasts by far during this last week. I know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and in fact, I eat a lot for breakfast, and I eat healthy: oats, dried nuts and fruits or any cooked whole cereal with avocado and fruit or veggies. Lately, I have eaten lots of green smoothies, and is incredible the amount of greens and fruit I am able to eat that way. But this week has been different. As I already told in previous posts, I can't study until late like some students do. I prefer to go to bed earlier and get up at 5 AM to study. Nobody disturbs because all my family is still sleeping, and my mind is cleared than at 12 PM. So, I have been taking advantage of the mornings to study. The result? I gave up porridge and smoothies and switched to easier and quicker breakfasts to have more time to study. So, I have been surviving on cereal coffee, dark chocolate, biscuits, dry cereals and that kind of food that would not be part of my common breakfast. Another reason was that I was stressed (well, I am still stressed, because my exams has not finished yet) and nervous, so I was craving sweet. The whole dark chocolate bar we bought last week disappeared in less than a week!
To compensate for that disastrous breakfast, today I made for myself a huge, nutritious and delicious green smoothie (I love weekends because I have time to eat because there is no hurry). Green smoothies are very versatile: you can blend almost everything you have in your fridge. I love smoothies because they are easier to digest than salads: I would never be able to eat so much veggies and fruits if they were not blended! In fact, I eat more than 1000 ml of green smoothie (sometimes even more than 1500 ml). If you don't believe me, look at the photo with the measuring cup.


Basic green smoothie

Actually, there is no recipe for green smoothies: you just have to blend your favourite fruit with different greens. At least, I don't follow any recipe. I put in the blender what I find in the fridge. All I can give you is some suggestions. The main rule to make good smoothies is that more or less half of the smoothie must be fruit. For people who has never ate green smoothies, I would recommend put more fruit than veggies (60% fruit and 40% veggies).

When you get used to the flavor, you can do the opposite: more veggies than fruit. It also depend of the fruit and the veggies you use. Some veggies are more difficult to eat for begginers, because of they strong flavor, like kale, and they must be used in small amount. Others, like cucumbers and lettuce have a very mild flavor and you won't notice them even in large amounts. As an example, this is the smoothie I ate today (is not he same as the one in the photo, which I did last week)

- 1 head of red lettuce
- 3 big leafes of green cabbage
-1 cucumber, peeled
- 1 kiwi (better if it's ripe)
- juice of 1 orange
- 1/3 chopped pinneaple
- a handful of soaked raisins
- juice of 1/2 lemon
- nuts, at taste, better if soaked (I used 2 walnuts, 2 Tablespoons of sunflower seeds and 2 Tablespoons of pumpkin seeds)
-optional: pieces of dark chocolate and a handful of granola or dry cereals

1.Chop all the ingredients. Reserve some of the chopped fruit to garnish, the nuts and the raisins.
2. Blend all the veggies, juice and fruit (except the reserved). If it's not sweet enough, you can add suggar, maple syrup or any sweetener of your choice.
3. After blend very well the veggies and fruits, add the reserved ingredients. I like to do it that way because I like finding pieces of something in the smoothie. I don't like it absolutely smooth. Today I also added pieces of dark chocolate and dried wheat and rice cereals. Yummy!

Other combinations: pear, kiwi, orange;lettuce, watercress / lemon, mango, strawberry;cabbage, cucumber, romaine lettuce / melon, apricot, pear; cabbage, carrot, lettuce....



I realised that the only photo of myself I inluded in the blog is the one of the personal profile. I have inluded photos of my family in previous post, but I didn't inlcude any photo of myself. So, I decided to play a little bit with the camera and to that collage. I know that I look horrible, but I did the photos one week ago, on Friday, when I arrived at home after a whole week of exams (and after the worst exam of all of them: the maths exam!), so I suppose you will understand why I look so tired.



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Fruit Smoothie on Foodista
Look for more combinations and ideas: a Fruit smoothie recipe in Foodista.
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i've always wanted to try this one out but I was scared i'd mess it up.I'll have to take on your advice and add more fruits and use milder tasting veggies :) wish you luck on your exams!