Struggling to get your daily vegetables? Get 8 servings in a tasty berry smoothie!
Most people are familiar with the “5-a-day” campaign, encouraging people to eat 5 servings of fruit and vegetables every day. Most people fall far short of that, and even those who try don’t realize that:
- an entire bag of salad from the supermarket is only about 1.5 servings of vegetables
- you should really be eating closer to 9 servings a day
That’s a lot of veggies! Trying to eat healthier, my roommate and I were intimidated until we realized we could blend an entire bag of spinach into one of our berry smoothies without even changing the taste. After that, the sky was the limit. There have been some near disasters, but nothing undrinkable. We’re still experimenting, but for now I present to you our baseline smoothie. It’s got eight – that’s right, eight – servings of fruits and vegetables and tastes better than anything you can get at Jamba Juice.
We get our frozen berries from Trader Joe’s and the frozen cooked squash from Safeway.
Niels and Craig’s Five-a-Day Smoothie
- 2 servings frozen spinach (1/3 bag)
- 2 servings frozen cooked squash (1/2 package)
- 2 overripe bananas (ideally frozen)
- 1 serving frozen mixed berries – we use strawberry, raspberry, blackberry (1/3 bag)
- Orange juice (just enough so your blender can function)
Blend spinach and orange juice. Liquefy. If your bananas are unfrozen, add them. Blend. Microwave the squash for 15 seconds so you can break the frozen block up into ice-cube sized pieces by hand. (You can skip this if you’ve got a better blender, but our $150 blender is pretty good and we still have to break up the squash.) Add all remaining ingredients. Blend.
Fills two glasses with a little left over. Whether this serves one or two is up to you.
A commenter on a previous post asked what business and social psychology books are on my bookshelf. Here are some of my favorites:
First of all, Daniel Gilbert’s TED talk on synthetic happiness is short, free, and cannot be missed. It rocked my world.
Robert Cialdini’s Influence should be read by anyone who has ever sold something, bought something, or tried to change someone’s mind. It’s both entertaining and informative. I remember reading through all the different methods he describes about how people are persuaded to do things and remember thinking for each one, “Yeah, I’ve noticed this and already guard myself against it.” Then he got to “scarcity” and I realized that explained both the $140 worth of sheets I just bought and the useless bottle of coconut syrup on my shelf. Damn.
Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick explains why some ideas are remembered and others aren’t. They illustrate the concept with a class that is asked to present a persuasive speech and rank their classmates. Thirty minutes later, they’re surprised with another request – to write down what they remembered from each classmate’s speech. Turns out speaking ability and idea stickiness are completely separate concepts, and in many cases, the latter is more important.
Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational rocks my world. His lecture here in Seattle was fantastic and the book includes all the speech’s examples plus way way more. The book is about behavioral economics – why people don’t make the rational choices that traditional economics expects us to. However, their irrational behavior is predictable and exploitable (if you choose to take that route).
Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice. I’m including it here for completeness. It’s a great book, but 75% of it is covered in Dan Gilbert’s TED talk and Dan Ariely’s book. Schwartz includes their ideas under a slightly different framework and has a few other great points (like why it’s crucial to leave on a high note), so it’s still worth a read.
I give it a 7 out of 10 on the crazy scale, from barhopping with friends on Friday to searching for socks downtown on Saturday, Belltown silliness Saturday night, new friends and old drama Sunday, finally culminating with a solid three hours of Spanish conversation practice Sunday night.
Spanish conversation is exhausting! It mentally and physically exhausts me the same way just going out to bars used to. But I’m optimistic; if two years later I can enjoy myself in a bar, I expect to eventually get to a conversational level in Spanish. After just an hour, I was ready to go but I stuck it out for two more. This year’s resolution of putting more time into learning languages is the only New Year’s resolution I’ve made in my life – I figure I ought to push myself a bit.
Also, at the time this post is going up I am once again top for a google search for “niels”. Take that, Niels Bohr, you are less important than my sock shopping.
Well, Ron, actually. In book 4:
“¡Vete a la mierda, Malfoy!” -le dijo Ron.
Literally: “Go to shit!”
I can’t wait for book seven to get translated. I bet when Mrs. Weasley uses the word “bitch” it’s going to get translated to something really nasty. Excellent.
The Berkeley Graduate magazine is doing a special issue on life after graduate school. I understand they have an article by a student who went into industry, another who went into academia, and another who returned to work for Berkeley. However, there is apparently one more perspective to be presented, and I’ve been asked to provide the dropout’s point of view.
I finished my first draft late last night and should have a version ready for the editors today. It was a challenging piece to write because it’s so easy to hear about someone dropping out and think, “Well, he dropped out because he couldn’t hack it. But I’m better and stronger, so I’ll finish where he failed.”
I’ve tried to capture what I felt so that readers see leaving grad school as a choice to be made, rather than as a sign of weakness or failure. Did I succeed? I suppose we’ll know if grad students start leaving Berkeley in droves after the article is printed.
The opportunity has reminded me how much I enjoy writing. My blog entries can take ten or fifteen minutes, but putting together a piece I can be proud of takes days. It’s something I’d like to budget more time for in the future. You know, once I have an income again.
Also, I’ve learned that “undoubtably” is not a word. The correct spelling is “undoubtedly”. People looking for more nitpicky grammatical errors may find them here. I personally fall on the descriptive side of the prescriptive vs. descriptive linguistics debate, so it upsets me that I really enjoy reading grammar rules.
