These Mono-Smoothies are a revelation, and something I’ll be drilling into my kids over the next year, as they have determined that this is the year which they want to learn all about how to navigate the kitchen and feed themselves (and their prospective guests in the future) under the auspices of their own acquired knowledge.

Live Green Smoothies and raw smoothies may be super-easy, but these Mono-Smoothies are in a whole new category of easy! Complete and utter no-brainers.

And they are DELICIOUS… light, sweetly refreshing, and just the very essence of freshness!

And Not Only Are They Both Delicious & Easy… They’re Cheap, Too!

And for anyone who has a concern about the cost of radically jacking up the raw and living fruits, vedgies, and greens in their diet, being able to make use of this easy smoothie-making technique will be a budget-saver!

I’m introducing 4 Mono-Smoothie recipes here, and I have 4 more to follow… and I will be sharing boatloads in the coming days so that my readers and subscribers truly gain an understanding of how valuable and useable the Mono-Smoothie concept is.

What do you need to make a Mono-Smoothie?

To make a Mono-Smoothie, you need a single kind of fruit, vegetable, or green (fresh and uncooked should go without saying…), some raw honey, spring water, and ice (ice is optional, according to your preference).

If you don’t want to use raw honey, that’s your business — do what works for you. But I’m an advocate of raw honey and all things made by bees. It is not “just another sugar” (can’t in any way compare with white sugar in my opinion, sorry).

It is rich with living enzymes, is a natural anti-inflammatory agent (read up on its helpful effects for people with asthma and arthritis), and has been famed for ages for its health-promoting, longevity-enhancing, and various healing properties. It is also included in a list within the TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) paradigm of foods that are recommended, as a part of “food therapy”, for diminishing candida-causing yeast and mold in the body.

I use raw honey generously. You use it according to your own taste and health requirements.

Pineapple Mono-Smoothie

Red Pepper Mono-Smoothie

Pumpkin Mono-Smoothie

Mint Mono-Smoothie

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The post below was originally published on my “This Raw Life” blog on April 6, 2009: The Easy Way to “Go Raw”… Take It Slow and Enjoy the Ride!

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Don’t struggle so hard with being “perfect” in your attempts to “go raw”. There’s an easy way to go about it…

I’ve been experimenting on and off with a raw foods lifestyle for over 4 years, at times being nearly 100%, at times slipping way-way-way into the cooked realm. And adding two or three blenderfuls of Live Green Smoothies every day has been by far the most helpful thing I’ve done, the one way I was able to jack up the living foods in my life without creating a sensation of deprivation.

My health, my weight, my energy, and my appearance all changed without “trying”… and so easily!

Just “Add and Substitute”… No Struggle

From the beginning, I’ve believed that the way to go about increasing the raw foods in one’s life is just to ADD… keep adding and don’t engage in a battle with yourself to cut things out. For the unhealthy stuff that have healthier versions, SUBSTITUTE…

Substitute a healthy salt for table salt, a healthy unprocessed whole sugar for white sugar, a sprouted grain bread (like Ezekiel bread) for bread made from flour. Substitute organic foods for foods grown with pesticides. And then just keep adding more of the raw and living foods…

Substitute raw nuts for roasted… raw nut butters for roasted nut butters. Make “Salad Sandwiches” heavy on the greens and veggies, or with amazingly tasty sandwich fillings made with avocado and sprouts and great seasonings.

And just keep adding more of the raw.

Enjoy Your Choices! Every Day is YOUR LIFE, and a Good One.

In between, if you have your pizza, your spaghetti with meat sauce, your birthday cake and brownies… meh… enjoy your choices! Don’t angst over them. Just keep adding more of the good stuff and filling out your life with richly mineralized, wildly nutritious foods. Find new ways to increase your superfoods… and each day your body will crave more and more of these things.

Your tastes and cravings will change. They change on their own — you don’t need to force the issue. What would be impossibly hard today eventually becomes easy of its own accord, because you genuinely crave something different. No forcing is necessary.

So whatever the degree of change you’re making today, whether it’s to have a salad instead of Mickey D’s or to get that third blenderful in of Live Green Smoothies… just enjoy the process. It’s a decision that is leading somewhere good.

Don’t forget to check out Angela’s “LGS Daily Recipe” online recipe magazine & the new “Jack Up The Raw” 6-week coaching program!

Live Green Smoothies For Beginners

To help you gauge a good beginner’s proportion of greens to fruit, I’ve included measurements below. But I personally never measure my greens or my fruit when I make Live Green Smoothies. Since we’re dealing with fresh produce here, it’s hard to standardize measurements. A small very ripe banana will tend to be sweeter than 2 medium un-ripe bananas. “Three leaves of kale” could be tiny or gargantuan, depending upon the bunch you bought.

A good ratio to use when making green smoothies is 60% fruit to 40% greens.

You can use any kind of greens, and it’s good over time rotate your choice of greens. But keep it simple. There is no reason for complexity, and in fact the simpler your Live Green Smoothies are, the better your body will be able to digest and absorb the special nutrients that they carry.

A newbie to Live Greenies will generally enjoy them on the sweeter side. But your tastes will adjust after awhile and you’ll want less sugar and more greens. There are no hard-and-fast rules, though,only guidelines. Mostly importantly, learn how to make the smoothies that taste good to you so that you’ll enjoy drinking them, and drink them often!

After you’ve blended your smoothie, taste it before you pour it out. Ask yourself the following questions, then add fruit or greens accordingly.

• “Do I want this more sweet, with more fruit?”
• “Do I want this more watery, with less greens?”
• “Do I want this energizing and really clarifying, with more greens?”
• “Do I want this more refreshing, with less fruit?”

A Word About Blenders

When I first started “going raw” and discovered Live Green Smoothies, I had a $20 two-speed “smoothie blender” I picked up at Wal-Mart. I achieved my entire personal transformation using that blender, and I enjoyed drinking all the smoothies that little pipsqueak of a machine churned out.

However, when I later picked up a powerful 3+ HP Blendtec “Total Blender” (revamped and now called “Home”, but the same machine), my experience of drinking Live Green Smoothies jacked up as much as my vitality had. I’d never want to go back — the pricier Blendtec was worth every penny. So, if you can afford it, get a Blendtec. If you can’t… no worries. Your smoothies will just be a bit “chewier”… but there’s no harm in that.

However keep this in mind: there is evidence to show that the 2+HP blenders have the ability to break through the cell wall of the fruit & vedge in your smoothies, making them all that more digestible and their nutrients all the more “bio-available” to your system!

A Word About Preparing Your Greens and Fruit

If you use organic produce and you have a Blendtec, everything is quick and easy: Rinse the produce and throw into the blender whole, except for fruits that have pits or rough external skin. I don’t peel or core my apples; I use the stems on my greens; I don’t dice anything into small pieces; and I don’t make my smoothies in stages (”First blend this, then blend that… and now this.”) Everything goes in, the button gets pressed, and presto, in 40 seconds it’s done. Maybe I’ll add ice at the end, so I’ll do a 2nd round. But that’s the maximum fussiness I put into my smoothies. I am both busy and lazy, and I have to be hard-pressed and well-persuaded to put needless energy into any of my tasks.

In addition, I use water to create at least a 32 oz finished product, so I don’t have to repeatedly jam the fruit & vedge down to get it to blend. There is sufficient liquid in the blender to get the job done quickly and easily.

If you don’t use organic produce, I recommend that transitioning over to more organic – besides the pesticide residue you’ll decrease in your system, and your contributing to more balanced agriculture, studies have revealed that organic fruit & vedge do indeed have more nutrients. And I’ve taste-tested many times — organic produce is definitively sweeter, more mineral-rich, and more tender than produce grown using pesticides. As for food preparation, you’ll have to be more aware of removing peels and skins, roots and tops. Do what you need to do to make sure the food is clean and safe.

Simple Greens-and-Fruit Combinations For Live Green Smoothie Beginners

Spinach is the green of choice for beginners. It has a strong, tannic flavor when cooked, but when it is raw it has virtually no flavor at all. Instead, it gives a flavor of intense “freshness” when combined with fruit. Parsley is also very refreshing and enjoyable for beginners. I tend to use Parsley far more frequently than Spinach these days because it’s much, much cheaper and I’ve tightened up the purse strings. As you begin to branch out, try other greens: Kale, Arugula, Watercress, Beet Greens, Collards, Dill, Cilantro, even Broccoli. Later you can even experiment with making Live Green Smoothie with sprouts…which make “green smoothies” of all lovely colors — purple, fushcia, orange, and yellow!

In general regarding fruit: choose “sweet” fruits as the basis of your combination. Reserve less-sweet fruits, such as berries, as additions… unless you want an extremely low-sugar, very tart smoothie.

• One of my all-time favorite smoothie combinations is Spinach and Pear. It tastes like “essence of pear”… super-refreshing! Try 2 pears to a handful of spinach.
• Another excellent combination is Parsley and Mango. This makes for a gorgeous spring-green smoothie, and these two flavors really complement each other. One mango should suffice; add a banana or some grapes if you want it sweeter.
• Spinach with Banana & Vanilla is great, especially if you add a bit of ice — it’s like a pretty, green, vanilla shake! Use 2 bananas with the spinach, and add either a dash of organic vanilla extract or a 1″ piece of vanilla bean.
• One I make frequently is Grapes with Parsley. It’s extremely refreshing, and one that I generally make when I’m less inclined to sip — for example, when I’m taking one to the gym or making a smoothie after an intense workout, or when I’m getting my third blenderful of smoothies in at the end of a busy day. Use the grapes from a nice large bunch!

Basic Live Green Smoothie Recipe for Beginners

• 1 cup (or a good medium-size handful) fresh spinach or parsley
• 2 heaping cups (or two pieces) fresh sweet fruit
• good, pure water to fill blender to 32 oz (or to the point at which it won’t explode when you turn it on to MAX)
• 1 cup of ice (optional)

Blend: Put everything in the blender and blend til everything is broken down as good as your blender can manage. In my Blendtec, I have it set to 40 seconds, which is overkill. If you have a weenie-blender, you might want to give it a full minute or more.

Drink: Pour into glass & drink, or into ice-filled water bottles to take with you on-the-go. One blenderful will generally fill two large water bottles with ice, with a bit left over to drink.

Clean up: Rinse with hot water, then tip over to drain & dry. No need to use soap — you haven’t used anything that requires soap to break down.

After getting your smoothie feet wet, begin tinkering with these proportions.

• Add a larger handful of greens, between 1 and 2 cups, or more. Try different combinations. Branch out to using kale, arugula, dill, watercress, beet greens, collards, broccoli… or anything else green you can buy in your produce section!
• Add less fruit, or play with fruit combinations.

And then start exploring some of the more adventurous combinations on this site and elsewhere!

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Here are some “How To Make A Green Smoothie” videos, for your viewing pleasure…

How To Make A Green Smoothie, with GreenSmoothieGirl

This video was produced by Green Smoothie Girl, whose site is an absolutely awesome resource for green smoothies. Make sure you check it out! It’s extremely informative and well-organized, and I find that I’m extremely well in sync with GreenSmoothieGirl — AKA Robyn’s — take on everything from the greens to soy to coconut oil and salt.

video management, video solution, video streaming

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This video was produced by Tim VanOrden of Running Raw.Com. I love this guy, and need to go out of my way to meet him because he’s also someone who has been leveraging the vital power of raw foods to become an elite athlete later in life. And he’s got more personality than his smoothie has chlorophyll!

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This video was produced by Sergei Boutenko, a member of the Boutenko Family well-known for being leaders in bringing green smoothies to the world. Make sure you check out their site. I completely support their “Keep It Simple” take on green smoothies. They are wise and informative — not to be missed!

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Don’t forget to check out Angela’s “LGS Daily Recipe” online recipe magazine & the new “Jack Up The Raw” 6-week coaching program!

Okay, time to address some of the basics about Live Green Smoothies. I’ve been lovingly hounded by my close friends and many colleagues over the last few years to give them some “Live Green Smoothie Basics”, so today’s the day all that info’s going up, and I’ll sleep the sleep of the just having finally delivered on my lagging promises…

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So… What’s a Live Green Smoothie?

A Live Green Smoothie is a handful of fresh greens and a handful of fresh fruit, all whirled up in the blender with the best water you have on hand.

Well, that’s the short answer, anyway.

There are  actually many, many — perhaps inexhaustible — ways to make a Live Green Smoothie. But today, let’s just talk basics…

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Live Green Smoothie Basics: Greens, Fruit, & Water

Live Green Smoothies Are Made With Living Greens

There are “green smoothies” and then there are “live green smoothies“.

I could make a green smoothie out of some milk, a frozen banana, and a couple tablespoons of powdered greens (such as spirulina or barley greens), and while that would be a far more nutritious drink than a McDonald’s shake or a can of Diet Coke, it wouldn’t be a Live Green Smoothie. Live Green Smoothies are made only with “live” greens.

I’m not knocking powdered greens. There are some excellent products out there, and they have their place. Anybody can benefit nutritionally by adding a quality powdered green to their diet, and if you are vegetarian or vegan, or shooting for being very “high-raw” or 100% raw vegan, an excellent powdered green may be a valuable component of your diet.

But I have never, ever felt the same way in my body with a smoothie made with that powder as I do with smoothies made from humble parsley, fresh kale, baby spinach, or home-grown sprouts.

In my view, powdered greens — no matter how expensive they were — should be relegated to “convenient backup” or “serious nutritional support” rather than the primary agent of nutrition in one’s daily diet.

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So What’s a “Live” Green… and Why Should I Care?

A “live” green is a green leafy vegetable that is still living, that hasn’t had the life cooked or dried out of it. Live greens still possess their living enzymes, the magical components that give all living things their viable life force.

In addition, green foods as a group are the most nutrient-rich foods on the planet. They are low-calorie, low-sugar, and low-fat, while at the same time high in minerals, vitamins, and the natural elements your body requires to run smoothly, without dis-ease.

The closer that live greens are to their original growing state, the more jam-packed with life-force, vitality, and nutrition they are. So, for example, greens tumbled out of a plastic container from your grocer’s produce section are simply not equal to greens you’ve cut from your garden, or from a pot growing on your windowsill.

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Mainlining Vitality

Green foods are nothing short of an intense nutrient injection into your system, and certainly the biggest nutritional “bang for your buck” that you could buy or consume. And when you blend greens up in your blender, all these valuable enzymes and nutrients become more “bio-available”, meaning that more get used.

When you drink Live Green Smoothies, you mainline these enzymes and nutrients into your system, and the mechanism that gives you your energy and health jumps into action. It’s got what it needs and runs with it! Your body is literally waiting on you to pour these enzymes into your system so that it can do its job and serve you quietly in the background without symptoms of fatigue, pain, or disease!

When you provide your system the living enzymes and rich nutrients it craves, you get a potent boost of well-being because things are working as they’re supposed to. When you don’t provide the enzymes and nutrients, you experience your energy being thwarted; you experience either constant cravings and restlessness, or listlessness and fatigue. And certainly, it’s easy then to start to fall into degenerative states of imbalance and disease.

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Chlorophyll… the Happy Magic Behind Live Green Smoothies

The regenerating, cleansing, infection-fighting, healing, and detoxification properties of chlorophyll-rich greens are well-known. With all that power lurking in live greens, waiting to be used, just think of the amazing changes you might unleash by jacking up the greens in your diet! You’d be turning yourself into a high-performance machine rather than the sluggish-engine-needing-a-tuneup that most people possess.

When I’m drinking Live Green Smoothies throughout the day, it feels like there’s liquid sunshine in my bloodstream. I’m not using hyperbole here — it genuinely feels like “liquid sunshine”. And why not? Chlorophyll is manufactured in partnership with sunshine — it is a product of white sprouts being exposed to the sun’s rays.

Chlorophyll is the green pigment formed in most plants when they are exposed to sunlight.

A fact I find extremely fascinating is that a chlorophyll molecule and a molecule of heme (the red pigment in the hemoglobin of your blood) closely resemble each other. Both are made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms organized around a central atom. In the chlorophyll molecule, that central atom is magnesium, while in heme it is iron.

Heme is an essential molecule for life — it is involved in sensing and using oxygen in your bloodstream, an extremely powerful role. Heme’s oxygen-related role and its correlation to chlorophyll is certainly a key to why Live Green Smoothies are so amazing in the body.

When I “jack up” my intake of “Live Greenies”, often just overnight I begin to feel an increase of oxygen in my body. I experience an increase of “ease” and peacefulness, similar to the sensation one gets after a good aerobic workout. It’s well-known that aerobic exercise is recommended for depression-sufferers due to the mood-elevating effects of increasing oxygen to the body. In the quantities that I consume Live Green Smoothies (by the blenderful, two to three blenderfuls a day) Live Green Smoothies have a similar effect. Try them out and see for yourself.

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What Fruit Should I Add to My Live Green Smoothies?

Someone once told me that, when greens and fruit are blended together, the greens act as builders and the fruit acts as a cleanser. This strikes me as perfect teamwork — the greens detoxify and the fruit flushes out, the two of them working in harmony.

You can put whichever fruits or fruit combinations you want into Live Green Smoothies, but I find that they require as a base some kind of sweet fruit, such as apples, pears, bananas, mangoes, oranges, grapes, papaya, and plums.

Berries of all kinds are great in Live Green Smoothies, but they taste best when combined with other sweet fruits because they do not provide much sweetness on their own. However, if for health reasons you require keeping the glycemic level of your diet extremely low, then berries are the place to start when creating your smoothies.

Can I Put Frozen Fruit Into My Live Green Smoothies?

When I first started out making Live Green Smoothies, I kept bags of frozen fruit in my fridge and used them daily. But then I realized that these foods were just as dead as the cooked foods I was moving away from. I consequently haven’t used frozen fruit in my smoothies for years.

A living thing is permanently affected by freezing. Freeze your hand solid overnight and tell me tomorrow after you’ve defrosted it if it’s anywhere near its original state. In fact, it will die and will have to be lopped off; that’s a fact. Similarly, meat that’s frozen in a freezer is actually tenderized when it’s defrosted, because the cells are damaged during the freezing process.

Living tissues are made of cells containing water, which expands when frozen, ultimately causing the cells to explode.

Putting frozen bananas and frozen mango into your green smoothie will most certainly be delicious… but it will not be a bonafide Live Green Smoothie made from living greens and living fruit.

Because Live Green Smoothies are all about maximum nutrition and vitality for your dollar, time, and consumption, I invite you to consider switching to only fresh fruits as your primary ingredients. Consider the frozen varieties in the same category as dried greens — they are backup for the sake of convenience, when the real deal is not on hand.

And of course, if it comes down to making Live Green Smoothies with frozen fruit or not making them at all, well…make the dang LGS!

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Does It Matter What Kind of Water I Use?

It will definitely matter to your health overall what kind of water you use when making your Live Green Smoothies. Your body is made up primarily of water. Use the very best quality water you have access to.

The subject of how to create the best water possible for yourself is a rich and critical subject on its own, which I’ll be discussing in later posts. But for now:

• If you’ve been drinking un-purified city tap water, at least invest in a decent counter-top filtration system, or use spring water.
• Water bottled in glass is better than water bottled in plastic.
• Pure water out of your own well is generally better than anything you could buy at the store.
• There are also excellent “water alkalyzers” that sit on your counter and purify the water while they also raise its PH content. I use one of these for my water, and it’s pretty nifty.

But whatever you do, just make sure  you use the best water you can.

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So, the Next Step… Whip Up a “Live Greenie” and Take It For a Test-Drive!

The thing to do now is to give yourself an experience of the energy, vitality, and well-being that comes from drinking Live Green Smoothies.

“The proof is in the pudding”, so-to-speak. Take this out of the realm of theory and create an experience of it in your life. The results will become inarguable.

Go to “How To Make A Live Green Smoothie” — read the simple instructions and watch a few of the videos. Then jump right in and make one.

Drink the whole blenderful. Then tomorrow, make two blenderfuls and drink them before the day is through. And on the third day, challenge yourself to make and drink three blenderfuls — two in the morning and one in the evening, around supper-time.

On the fourth day you’ll know in a very personal way what a Live Green Smoothie really is, because it will be deep inside your body, working its magic. And you’ll be hooked, because your system will start craving them.

After one week of three blenderfuls of Live Green Smoothies every day, the magic of Live Green Smoothies will become utterly self-evident.

I came across a post over on the blog “every little thing” which made me smile because it’s about starting off as a green smoothie addict using a cheap low-speed blender and then finally switching to a high-speed Blendtec, which could pretty much rip up a horse.

The article “Wise Owls Drink Green Smoothies” says:

“I bought a Blendtec, and it’s one of the best appliance purchases I’ve ever made.  I’m not gonna lie people, this is crazy expensive blender, we’re talking $400 a pop.  It was a tough decision , but we had the money (for a change) and honestly, if I had know how amazing it was, I would have turned a blind eye and put one on a credit card a long time ago.  Not even kidding.”

I felt exactly the same way when I bought my own Blendtec!

I actually managed my whole raw foods “transformation” on just a $20 2-speed “smoothie blender” I picked up at Wal-Mart, the kind with the spout that’s supposed to drain the smothies straight into your waiting cup. So my smoothies were “chewy”… meh, I didn’t care. I chew my smoothies anyway. All was good.

But when I had a bit of cash, I bought my own Blendtec and — wow! — what a coolio difference!

Texture of smothies with the Blendtec — smooooooth, like liquid. In fact, you can use them to make “whole food juice”. Stick your carrots in there and they’re completely pureed fine.

The other benefit of a 3+ horsepower blender like the Blendtec is that is actually breaks down the cell walls of the fruit & vedge, making their nutrients more “bio-available”. What that means is better absorption for you, more nutrition, more energy, more well-being.

When my own Blendtec arrived, I unveiled it to ooooo’s and aaaahh’s from my kids as they proclaimed, “No way… is this the Will It Blend blender?!!!!” And I made sure to give a little lecture making quite clear that “In no way will this blender be used for iPods, iPhones, or any other such thing that is not a fruit or vegetable!” They got a kick out of it. And musta worked, since so far… no iPhone dust has appeared in the kitchen from having been furtively ground up in the Blendtec. But it is that powerful.

The cheapest place I found on the Web to buy a Blendtec was at the Raw Guru site, which is where I got mine. (This is not an affiliate link.)

Also, note: The blender used to be called the Blendtec “Total Blender” but then was revamped and now is called the Blendtec “Home” blender, so don’t get confused if you see ads for both. They’re one & the same.

So… be a “wise owl”, buy a Blendtec if your pocketbook can afford it… and make some green smoothies!

If you can’t afford the pricier Blendtec… just chew your smoothies. It’s all good.

One of the things I’ll be doing with this Live Green Smoothie Diet site is not just to share my own take on the raw foods/green smoothie movement, but also to highlight the best and the most current that’s going on in the raw foods world.

There are some absolutely wonderful leaders, teachers, and coaches out there already, and I want to be sure that whoever may be in my own audience is completely tuned-in to who these great people are.

Am starting off with a brief highlight of Karen Knowler – aka “The Raw Food Coach” — a British sweetheart with an excellent website offering recipes, books, training products, and coaching, and with about 20 recipe-making YouTube videos to-date.

She was formerly the MD of The Fresh Network (the UK’s raw and living foods organization) and has very well-organized PR.

I love her gentle demeanor and heart-felt approach to sharing her knowledge.

Here’s one of her videos where she prepares a spinach-mango green smoothie. She likes to make her smoothies with little water — personally, I add much more. But one can do these things however one wishes… just get the live foods into you system however you like!

“Karen Knowler’s Green Smoothie”