Ping Pong and Green Smoothies

This week went by pretty quickly, and with my boyfriend already tuckered out in bed, I thought I'd share.

THE PING PONG STORY
While biking home, I see people playing ping pong through the chain link fence in a pretty neglected park by our apartment. I realize that Eric has a couple of ping pong paddles lying around.

I go on Amazon and purchase some ping pong balls (they sell a lot of 300-packs for beer pong...). Tonight, after dinner we decide to move around a bit and play some pong. It was fabulous. We were out there for about forty minutes. We realized that was the longest either of us had been outside that day. It's kind of pathetic, especially because I consider myself to be a lot more outdoorsy since I bike to and from work (15 min each way) and generally try to leave the office to walk around or run an errand at lunchtime. It felt old-fashioned, like when I was a kid and would race to go outside and play after dinner, especially during warm summer nights.

I beat Eric two games to one. I'm pretty competitive, but I had an advantage since I play tennis (I think anyway). I like that we're not too unevenly matched. Success! Hopefully I can rope some other friends into playing or turn it into a drinking game sometime.

GREEN SMOOTHIES
I make fruit smoothies semi-regularly with my immersion blender. I have it down to a science
1) frozen fruit from whole foods
2) frozen bananas--I slice up all extra, overripe bananas and put them in the freezer for this use
3) yogurt
4) milk or fruit juice to thin

However, I feel like they're not as filling as, say, having some yogurt and berries and actually chewing everything. They can also be pretty sweet. I've been seeing a lot of green juices around lately, usually priced at some insane level like $7 or $9.50, so I thought I'd try to make my own at home. Tonight I made a kale smoothie as follows
1) As many leaves of kale (de-stemmed) as I could fit into my pyrex measuring cup
2)frozen banana + frozen strawberry
3)milk

It was surprisingly good, just a little bit of vegetal bitterness. As Eric said, after trying it reluctantly, "It could hold a lot more kale."

Our CSA starts up in three weeks (yay!) so I think green smoothies will be a good way for us to quickly go through perishable vegetables. Last year we got into kale chips to go through all the kale, but this year I'm hoping we can add smoothies to our "easy ways to eat kale" repertoire. A sidenote: I'm all about fiber, but I suspect the kale is behind some major intestinal rumblings this evening. Ironically, when I googled this I came across a website recommending you make raw vegetables more "digestible" was to make a green smoothie. Yeah, right...

Anyway, the real way to make an awesome smoothie is to have a high-end vitamix or whatever but I told Eric to check out craigslist and I think we're going to get a $200 for $50. Nice!