He Cooks! – Smoothie Edition

The Fab Hub sends me off to school every day with a smoothie.

One day this week, my smoothie smelled horrendous. Like rotten eggs horrendous. It was so bad I couldn’t get it close enough to my face to drink it. I offered it to the BFF to smell, just in case I was imagining it. Nope. It smelled awful.

I finally had an opportunity to call him and asked what he put in the smoothie. He rattled off the standard ingredients; nothing was out of the ordinary.

“It smells like eggs,” I said. “Are you sure you didn’t dump Kidzilla’s eggs into the smoothie by mistake?” He had been planning to make her Daddy Scrambled Eggs for breakfast.

FH: No. I did not put eggs in the smoothie.

Me: Well, it smells like eggs. Bad eggs. Rotten bad smelly eggs.

FH: Wait.

Me: Wait, what?

FH: Oohhh, wait…I might have put mayonnaise in it by accident.

Mayonnaise???  What the —

FH: I was making Zilla’s lunch and I had the mayonnaise out. I might have thought it was yogurt.

Those two things are not even remotely the same. In his defense, the Fab Hub balances about ten things in our kitchen in the morning – breakfast for me, breakfast for Zilla, food for the Rotten Cats, coffee, lunch for me, lunch and a snack for Zilla, schoolbags, lunch bags, chore and errand lists for the day, lunchbox notes for Kidzilla… He puts Michael Keaton’s Mr. Mom to shame.

So the mayonnaise smoothie was a huge fail. But it should be noted here that the Fab Hub generally turns out a wicked smoothie.

Most days he makes what we’ve started calling the Standard Drill smoothie. This is kind of like the “cuppa cuppa cuppa” dessert Dolly Parton describes in Steel Magnolias. Not difficult at all.

Fab Hub’s Standard Drill Smoothie goes something like this:

• 1/2 to 1 cup of yogurt (we use nonfat, plain Greek yogurt)
• 1/2 to 3/4 cup of milk (whatever kind you like)
• 1/2 to 3/4 cup of juice (whatever kind you like)
• 1 cup of fruit (whatever you have on hand, any combo that works for you)
• sometimes chia seeds or flax seeds (totally optional)
• sometimes a couple of stalks of kale (also optional, but I like the greens content)

Put in blender or Vitamix and blend.

A variation of the Standard Drill and another Fab Hub go-to smoothie is his Berry Almond Smoothie.

Pretty much the same ingredients as the Standard Drill, but stick to berry juice and only berries for the fruit. Add a “blop” of almond butter instead of chia or flax.

How big is a “blop,” you ask? I asked the Fab Hub the same thing.

“It’s a bloppy spoonful.”

Not. Helpful.

I explained that in a recipe you can’t say a blop is bloppy. That’s like saying wet is soggy. It begs the question.

I tried again to get Smoothie Man to explain the blop.

He proceeded to ask me what a RAM chip does.

Me: I beg your pardon?

FH: A RAM chip. What does it do?

Me: I have no idea.

FH: Exactly.

Me: WTF?

FH: Answer, please.

Me: Well, if I’m guessing (which I was) I’d say it’s either something that comes from a male goat’s butt or it’s a computer thing.

FH: See? You use a computer but you can’t answer what a RAM chip does.

I honestly did not see how this was the same at all.

In the end, after a somewhat philosophical argument discussion about how to measure a blop, the Fab Hub explained that the only way to describe the measure of a “blop” without using the word “blop” or “bloppy” was this: take a spoon, spoon out a blop of almond butter and blop it in. How do you know if you have the appropriate-sized blop? According to the Fab Hub, “it just fits.”

Honestly.

In addition to the Fab Hub standards, he will whip up pretty much any smoothie recipe I request, provided that I produce both proper ingredients and instructions.

Tomorrow, I’ve asked for an apple kale smoothie, since we have both organic apples and organic kale on hand from the CSA. I found this one on Pinterest (where else) a long time ago. It’s not our recipe, but it’s quick and completely delicious.

Apple Kale Smoothie

• 1 medium apple
• 2 small stalks kale, chopped
• fresh juice from one orange (we’ve substituted plain old orange juice here, about 1/2 cup)
• 1 teaspoon fresh ginger
• juice from one lemon

We’ve occasionally added Greek yogurt to up the protein content. If you go that route, you may want to add some apple juice or water to help the consistency.

Thanks for joining us for another episode of He Cooks! Still to come…someday…Fab Hub’s famous Oregano Teriyaki Chicken.