cheryl
Administrator
Staff member
In Defense of the Dinner Smoothie - GQ
Want to feel less sad about your lazy kitchen tendencies? Start blending your dinner.
I’ve always been a big smoothie guy. Similar in form to ice cream (my favorite food) and in function to fruit salad (my favorite food that isn’t ice cream), smoothies are easy to make, consume, and clean up after, thereby meeting the criteria that I, a supremely lazy and culinarily unambitious millennial, use when evaluating what to eat at home.
I first became intimately aware of smoothies’ utilitarian mealworthiness when, in 2014, I moved to a Manhattan apartment that ended up having no cooking gas for ten of the twelve months I lived there. Grilling frozen chicken on my roommate’s George Foreman was getting tedious, so one night, conscious of the fact that I hadn’t yet eaten a single vegetable that day, I made a smoothie for dinner. Not, mind you, the kind of “green” smoothie your hippie yogi friend drinks that looks like liquefied grass clippings and tastes like, well, liquefied grass clippings. My smoothie was a calorically bountiful blend that was physical shorthand for a bunch of complementary foods liquefied—milk, overripe bananas, end-of-season berries, arugula, oats. Despite being thrown together with the limited number of edible items already in my kitchen, it tasted good. This, for me, was a novelty. And, because it was comprised of so many largely unprocessed foods, I didn’t feel guilty for having put it inside my body. Another novelty.
Want to feel less sad about your lazy kitchen tendencies? Start blending your dinner.
I’ve always been a big smoothie guy. Similar in form to ice cream (my favorite food) and in function to fruit salad (my favorite food that isn’t ice cream), smoothies are easy to make, consume, and clean up after, thereby meeting the criteria that I, a supremely lazy and culinarily unambitious millennial, use when evaluating what to eat at home.
I first became intimately aware of smoothies’ utilitarian mealworthiness when, in 2014, I moved to a Manhattan apartment that ended up having no cooking gas for ten of the twelve months I lived there. Grilling frozen chicken on my roommate’s George Foreman was getting tedious, so one night, conscious of the fact that I hadn’t yet eaten a single vegetable that day, I made a smoothie for dinner. Not, mind you, the kind of “green” smoothie your hippie yogi friend drinks that looks like liquefied grass clippings and tastes like, well, liquefied grass clippings. My smoothie was a calorically bountiful blend that was physical shorthand for a bunch of complementary foods liquefied—milk, overripe bananas, end-of-season berries, arugula, oats. Despite being thrown together with the limited number of edible items already in my kitchen, it tasted good. This, for me, was a novelty. And, because it was comprised of so many largely unprocessed foods, I didn’t feel guilty for having put it inside my body. Another novelty.