Goodfood Smoothie Recap

Goodfood launched their smoothies add-ons for the boxes a few weeks ago (maybe a month or so). For their current clients, they gave a little discount to have the incentive to give it a go. Of course, being the wanna-be health nuts that we are, we wanted to give a go out of curiosity mostly. I’m not sure the smoothie lifestyle is for me but it sure helps in getting in the fruits and veggies count as well as the hydration and milk count although we do use almond milk.

With that said, they launched with 6 flavors. It comes with the 12 smoothies pack so we decided to grab 2 of each flavor so that my husband and I could each try it out.

Let’s take a look at it.

I know I’m missing one but I took this afterwards and the Mean Greens cups both were broken in the process of transport so we had to make those quickly. With that said, it should have more organization and whatnot to keep the containers in an upright position or just a way that it doesn’t break so easily since it is put into an insulated box with dry ice. Other than that, the packaging with the cups and lids makes it very convenient and saves my own cups from having to wash and whatnot and it should all be recyclable or if you please, reused since its fairly sturdy.

For each of the smoothies though, I decided to just take the images from Goodfoods site since smoothies aren’t exactly the most appealing thing to look at. This is in the order that we tasted it. I have put aside that our blender is not at par to make smoothies but we will be hopefully hunting for some boxing day deals to get a ninja blender or something along those lines because we do want to start having more smoothies and such.

Let’s see what we thought.

Mean Green

Nothing like drinking a salad, right? That is pretty much what I thought about this one. It felt like I was drinking a salad. I prefer to eat my salads so this worked for its purpose and tasted exactly as I’d expected. Actually, I take that back because it smelled pretty acidic but when I drank it, it actually didn’t taste acidic, just very green, if you know what I mean. Which is a good thing. It was a pleasant surprise in a way. The husband however, wasn’t a big fan of this one.

Mango Goji

I’m a huge fan of mango and goji. This sounds like something really healthy and perfect. Somehow though, this one didn’t work too well for me and I blame it on papaya because I’ve always found it really heavy and sweet that it just doesn’t appeal to my taste buds. However, its not such a bad flavor just in shorter doses for myself. However, my husband did approve with this one.

Cocoa Mint Boost

I’m a big fan of mint chocolate flavored anything and think of this as something a lot more natural but with a similar taste profile to that. It works really well. I’m not such a big fan of the addition of the kale but everything else here works really well together.

Acai Bellini

Acai Bellini is definitely our favorite in the Goodfood smoothie selection. It has to do with the normalcy of it if we look at the ingredients but it tasted so delicious. It had such a great balance with fruity and fun. It is how I pictures smoothies would taste and it was absolutely fantastic. Both my husband and I are fans of this one.

Carrot Ginger

Carrot Ginger is really good also. We called this kind of like a carrot cake and gingerbread cookie all mixed together. Plus, it had these little details that taste so great. We are a big fan of this one. Probably our second favorite.

Pina Colada

And the unanimous choice of what didn’t work for us is this one. I think its the fact that wheatgrass and our blender didn’t go too well and it felt like I was eating grass. It was also the idea that it smelled like this beautiful rich coconut smell but the taste was kind of acidic and coconut which was this weird effect on my taste buds. The husband and I didn’t really like this one a lot. I’m sure for experienced smoothies, this might work but its just not for us.

That’s it for this Goodfood Smoothies recap!
This is a special recap segment.

Mother’s Day Baking: Morning Glory Muffins

Good morning! Not so great because its Monday? How about some sweet smelling baked goods to wake you up?

I’ve been really taking it easy on the baking.  It mostly has to do with the fact that other than renovating my new place, its been a lot of shifting and sorting through my stuff taking up most of my weekends. The intention is always there.  I’m a baker at heart.  Nothing quite replaces the feeling of whipping up a batter of sweetness. Its my dream to become a successful baker but time is rather scarce right now.  Any event is a good excuse to put my other duties aside and get out the spatula and preheat the oven.  My mom already baked a bunch of stuff so I decided to bake a batch of muffins for my boyfriend’s mom. After some thought, I remember that she loves carrot cake/muffins, etc.

I recently got this new cookbook with lots of delicious recipes that I’ve been dying to try out.  This book is called Butter Baked Goods by Rosie Daykin.  In the carrot ingredient, I had a choice of a carrot cake (that required too much work) so I went for the Twice-a-Week/Morning Glory Muffins.

Fresh out of the oven!

I made a few small changes but here is the recipe:

Makes 12 muffins

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 3/4 cups granulated sugar

1 tbsp cinnamon

2 tsp baking soda

2 cups grated carrots

1 cup sultana raisins

1 cup unsweetened shredded coconut

1 cup chopped pecans

1 large apple, peeled, cored and grated

4 large eggs

1 cup vegetable oil

1 tbsp pure vanilla

Close-up!

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350F.
2. In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, cinnamon, baking soda, carrots, raisins, coconut, pecans and apple and mix well.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk together the eggs, oil and vanilla.
4. Add the liquid ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix until just combined.
5. Use the ice cream scoop to divide the batter evenly between the paper liners
6. Bake in the preheated oven for 35 minutes.
7. Remove from the oven and allow the muffins to cool slightly in the pan, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

The first bite! 🙂

As mentioned before, I made some little changes here.  Most of it includes swapping lacking ingredients and excluding others.  First of all, I excluded raisins (because I don’t have them) and apples (because I was tired of grating).  Second, I replaced chopped pecans with slivered almonds because thats all I  had. Also for the baking time, depending on your oven, I suggest for you to lower the baking time by just a little.  Mine were ready in about 25 minutes.

Phoebe @Starry Traveler dropped by to hang out a bit and she’s not a huge cinnamon fan.  This muffin has more than usual amount of cinnamon but somehow the variety of ingredients balances out the taste really well and she liked it.  I wasn’t too sure how removing the apple and raisins would be for the recipe but I actually like the taste that it gave.  Plus, its more focused on emphasizing the carrots and sweetness and adding a nice chewy part with the coconut shreds and crunchy with the almonds.  Very nice for the taste buds!

The only thing time consuming about this recipe is grating those carrots.  I’m not much for grating anything so my inexperience made me incur some slight cuts.  Be very careful! Other than that, have fun and enjoy! It is truly a heavenly mix and I’m not much of a muffin person, so that says a lot 🙂

Lets hope I start getting back into my foodie and baker lifestyle.  I seriously missed it a lot! 🙂

Are you a muffin person? How about carrots and/or cinnamon? What do you think of this?