Rediscovering Smoothies

In April I got a NutriBullet blender, thinking it would work better than the blender I had that didn't work so well and was really hard for me to clean.  The NutriBullet has a way more powerful motor and is supposed to liquefy fruits and veggies.  Well, it doesn't exactly liquefy them, and it doesn't break down seeds nearly as well as I thought it wood, but it does at least make it easier for me to get healthy fruit/veggie smoothies.  I'd been making smoothies with my other blender, but they mainly consisted of things like Nestle Breakfast Essentials or protein powder, juices or milk, yogurt, liquid egg, and other stuff that wasn't too hard to blend.  Although my smoothies aren't as big as the ones in the NutriBullet recipes (those are way too big for me), I at least manage to get a pretty healthy dose of fruits and veggies into me most days.

It was pretty tough going at first, and even now it's still not what I'd call enjoyable, but at least I learned something about the trouble I've always had with swallowing pulpy stuff.  My first couple NutriBullet smoothies were an exercise in sheer frustration, since they were much too thick for me to drink, and even after I thinned them out with more liquid I found it too hard to get the berry seeds all the way down my throat.  That's when I finally started to wonder why I'm able to eat solid foods as long as I can chew them up finely but I can't drink pulpy stuff.  So next time I was eating solid food I tried to figure out what I was doing differently from when I was drinking.  I finally figured out that my tongue is almost always at the roof of my mouth when I'm eating and that the food goes down the sides of my tongue to get down my throat.  OK, I'm sure that sounds really weird to a lot of you, and I don't know how to explain why this would affect my being able to swallow solid stuff, but I'm thinking maybe the center of my throat opening is more closed off than the sides.  Anyway, the next day I made another smoothie and tried drinking it with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, and it worked!  All the pulpy stuff went down without getting stuck.  I tried another smoothie with berries, and I was able to get the seeds down too.  I still have to run the blender for a few minutes to get it to a consistency I can handle (I only let it run 50 seconds at a time though and wait a couple minutes between so the motor doesn't overheat).  I've tried to run the blender for less time and use a strainer for the rest of it to cut down on my power usage, but I'm exhausted by the time I'm done and there are still too many seeds left (I stopped trying to do this when I got a raspberry seed stuck in my throat).

Although the NutriBullet's a little easier to clean than my old blender it's still not that easy for me to clean. And I can't say I've been feeling any better with all those fruits and veggies inside me like the other NutriBullet users say they do.  But at least I'm getting healthy stuff into my stomach, and maybe it takes a long time before you actually feel the results.  I've also been really lucky to find lots of frozen veggies and fruits in my grocery store that aren't too expensive, since I'm afraid that fresh fruits and veggies would hang around my place too long past their prime.  Well, gotta go now and have my lunch smoothie (1/2 cup of spinach, 1/2 cup of carrots, 1 cup of blueberries and some orange juice).