It’s been a little while since my last update and I’ve been crazy-busy at work until now. This all started last Monday; under the original deadline, I had until the following Monday to complete all 90-some pages in the site. Fortunately, the deadline was extended a bit and they also allowed me to bring on another contractor to help. The site is just about done now, and I’m glad that it’s behind us.
In any case, I wanted to celebrate the progress and — coincidentally — Mike and I had a 6 lb bag of frozen strawberries that was taking up a good deal of room in our freezer. Mike suggested that we could make strawberry smoothies and that sounded pretty good to me.
As it turns out, I had originally bought the strawberries (at Sam’s Club, natch) for use in smoothies. And, my intention was to create some kind of healthy protein-based drink. At the time, I filled the blender about a third-full with frozen strawberries, and added a about a cup of milk, a quarter cup of Splenda, a tablespoon of vanilla, two scoops of protein powder, a quarter-package of tofu, and some ice.
Considering the nature of the ingredients, that smoothie wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t something that I’d find myself craving and I’d say that it fell more on the side of a meal-replacement smoothie than a dessert smoothie. But, considering the project completion at work, I wanted something that was extra-tasty this time.
So, Mike suggested that we use ice cream instead of tofu — not exactly a health-motivated substitution, but a potentially delicious one. We needed to go to Sam’s Club for some groceries anyway, so we headed off and picked up some Blue Bell Vanilla ice cream there.
Being that Mike had made ice cream-based smoothies before, I let him man the blender. First, he added both the strawberries (about two-thirds full) and the ice cream (about an inch up the side of the blender). He blended those, and then added about a quarter-cup of Splenda, about a teaspoon of vanilla (not too much since the ice cream was already vanilla), and half a banana. And, the ice went in right at the end.
I’ll have to admit — this was a very good smoothie, and the recipe wasn’t hard either. It was definitely better-tasting than my original smoothie, but I’m guessing that the tofu / ice cream substitution may have had something to do with that ;). Considering the nature of the recipe, I’m curious whether our creation may have been more of a milkshake than a smoothie (?).
So, we made a couple smoothies on Monday evening and again on Tuesday evening (yeah, they’re that good). And, we’re working our way through that 6 lb bag of frozen strawberries, so all this smoothie-drinking has the side-benefit of freeing up some room in the freezer as well :).