Victoria’s Juicy Secrets

- by Victoria Leenders-Cheng

Honestly? I love vegetables, I really do, but their liquid form has always struck me as somewhat repulsive. I think it had to do with a juice I ordered once perhaps a decade ago – apple-carrot something or other, or maybe it was ginger-celery this and that. Wanting to drink it up because it was healthy, I took two giant gulps before realizing the unusual taste had my stomach turning queasy somersaults.

Tomato juice has always been okay by me, probably because it’s so salty it just tastes like a chilled soup. But the pungent, earthy quality of other liquefied vegetables always seemed epicureanly wrong. Carrots tasted sweet yet pasty. Celery had a strange kick of licorice. And cucumber, with its bland, green chill? No thank you!

What I didn’t realize until recently is that there’s a secret to making vegetable drinks not only palatable but positively, thunderously delicious: greens.

See, many leafy greens – spinach, chard, kale, collards – don’t actually affect the taste of the concoction, especially if you’re savvy about incorporating flavors you love. The luxurious, golden tones of ripe fruit are a great place to start.

The first green smoothie I had, about a month ago, was a banana hemp-seed creation just packed with kale. The banana brought its distinctive flavor and an appealing kick of sugar while the hemp seed sat on my tongue saying, “I taste almost like peanut butter, without the risk of anaphylactic shock!” The kale graciously remained mute.

I was so blown away by the experience that I spent the next week bringing friends over to my kitchen to test out my newest party trick. I would blend fragrant bananas, as ripe as they could go, with water and hemp seed and then pause to watch my friends cringe or raise their eyebrows as I tossed a load of kale into the mix.

I would pour the now-green slop into tall, inviting glasses or gorgeously decorated mugs, pass the cups around and wait.

Then, triumph!

“You can’t even taste the kale at all!” one friend exclaimed, obviously relieved.

“It’s good… it’s really good,” another said with deep surprise.

I started getting adventurous with my own smoothies: mangoes, pears, plums. Wilting lettuce. The tops of strawberries. Pith-lined chunks of oranges. A couple of weeks later, I even put my first handful of cilantro into a blender full of papaya.

It wasn’t great, I’ll admit that right off the bat. The cilantro wafted up my nose and lingered on my tongue, its taste overpowering everything else in the mixture. Ugh. And I normally like cilantro! I put it on soups, sprinkle it liberally on curries, stuff it into Vietnamese rice paper wraps… I even like it the way it’s commonly served in Thailand, on strawberries and pineapple. I love cilantro. But not in my smoothie.

Not that time, anyway.

I backed off and headed for familiar ground: bananas, hemp seed, water and kale. Mmmm.

The next day, I decided to give cilantro another run around. This time, I started with what I knew I liked – strawberries and pineapple were already cilantro-friendly fruits in my book so I used the reddest strawberries and sweetest, ripe pineapple* I could get my hands on. Then I gingerly blended in a couple of sprigs of cilantro and took a sip. Hmmm… not too bad. I could get used to this.

Was I ready to cast my chef’s eye on my old juice nemeses, carrots, celery and cucumber? Nope, not yet.

But maybe someday soon.

* Note: My process of greens acclimatization has used sugar as its constant friend and companion. Naturally-occurring sugar, of course, in the most decadently ripe of mangoes, cantaloupes, bananas and papayas, but sugar nonetheless.