Eating breakfast is important and I finally got into the habit of doing this every morning.  After  a night of sleeping your stomach has been on a fast.  You want to break that fast by eating something in the morning . This is how we come to the term “breakfast.”

I’m into trying to use the food I have on hand before buying more and this morning I woke up to a pretty empty kitchen. Every morning I pretty much have some type of smoothie and wanted some fresh greens to use so I could add protein powder.  But no greens were to be found anywhere – pooh!

That didn’t mean there weren’t options and that’s the whole point. I had plenty of food in the house that could make a good breakfast and it’s not good to get stuck on one thing or the other.  I remembered the bag of salad greens so I opened that and got it washed and ready.  But looking at the counter I found five or six oranges that needed to be used right away.

So it was going to be a fresh orange juice smoothie this morning.  One thing I learned about orange juice or other citrus juice such as grapefruit juice is that it has a cleansing property that washed through the body. Putting protein powder into this drink would only push it through pretty quickly so I drink the orange juice plain.

Now let me clarify that this was going to be  a smoothie, not a juice.  That has to be clear because so much is focused on juicing these days. I’ll talk about why I do more smoothies than juicing in another post.

I used to cut fresh oranges, squeeze them in a squeezer to get the juice then put them in my blender to blend up with the pulp or bananas, or other fruit. Then I realized my blender was powerful enough to blend the oranges without all of that.  So now they get peeled and put into the blender, pulp and all.  I use the soup setting on my Blendtex because that pulverizes everything much more.  Don’t let it go too long however, or the juice will get warm. That’s great when you’re actually making soup but not a smoothie.  I let it go about 45 seconds and often add crushed ice afterwards, blend again for only 10 to 15 seconds and breakfast is ready.

It took a while to get used to drinking a smoothie as a breakfast and not be hungry as soon as it was finished.  It still doesn’t take care of the hunger everyday but over time, your stomach shrinks and lessor food satisfies quicker.  For this morning, it was great. However, I have that green salad waiting in the wings for a mid-morning snack.