Making Smoothies

Like I said a few weeks ago, a staff member at my care facility gifted me a smoothie maker. It’s a totally awesome thing! I already had a blender, but that one was rather huge and is now in the kitchen for the staff to make fruit mixtures with for the clients who can’t chew.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve regularly been making smoothies with the new smoothie maker. Despite its relatively small size, it’s pretty powerful. It blends smoothies within like ten to fifteen seconds. It also deals nicely with frozen fruit without me having to use the pulse function.

Last Saturday, the grocery store delivered some peaches to the facility at my request. We also still had blueberries in the freezer and soy milk in the fridge. I loved making a smoothie with these ingredients. I used:


  • 1 peach

  • A handful of frozen blueberries

  • 1 cup soy milk

  • A handful of oatmeal


Yes, you can actually use oatmeal in smoothies! I knew, but some foodies say you need to use instant oatmeal. Well, at least I didn’t.

Yesterday, a staff bought some food they’d forgotten to order from the grocery store. Among it was fresh spinach. That’s really tasty in a smoothie, so today I chose to make another smoothie. This time I used:


  • 1 banana

  • Fresh spinach (I took a large handful)

  • A handful of frozen blueberries

  • 1 cup soy milk


I didn’t use oatmeal this time, because I didn’t intend the smoothie to be too filling. I loved it though! You hardly taste the spinach. In the pic, it looks a bit weird, but believe me, it was delicious.

Do you like smoothies?

Oatmeal

Hi readers, how are you? I’ve truly been very active lately. Today I initially didn’t feel that motivated to do much of anything, but I eventually managed to read a good amount. I also walked for 30 minutes, albeit divided between a 10-minute walk together with another client and a 20-minute walk with just the staff. And now I’m looking through my drafts folder to start a blog post for today.

Last week, lots of ideas were floating through my mind. I couldn’t actually follow through on most completely independently, so I discussed some with my day activities staff. I wanted to do a cooking activity again. For some reason, I got thinking about trying out oatmeal recipes. So I went about and googled some simple oatmeal recipes. I cannot seem to find the one I used right now.

What I Used


  • 4 cups almond milk.

  • 2 large bananas.

  • 2 cups oatmeal (it’s just sold as oatmeal here, not rolled oats or anything).

  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract.
  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon.

  • Tiny pinch of salt (I didn’t think I’d like that, but it was in the recipe).

I had the staff mash the bananas with a fork. Then we threw all ingredients in a saucepan and brought it to a boil. Then turned the heat down and had it cook for a few minutes. I stirred constantly, so that the oats wouldn’t get crusty. After we removed the oatmeal from the stove, we added granola as a topping. That wasn’t in the recipe I used, but I thought I’d like it and we had lots of granola left over anyway.

My sister used to eat oatmeal for breakfast when she was little. I never quite liked it, but this was truly delicious! It was also very filling. I ate it for lunch and didn’t need anything else to feel full.

The staff gave some of the oatmeal without the topping to some clients who normally eat mashed bread porridge and they loved it too.

Next time, I’m going to try to make some overnight oats. I’m not going to let it sit in the fridge for an entire night, but most recipes I checked said two hours is generally enough.

Do you like oatmeal or other porridge?