Drink your Greens: Taste Balancing Tips

As many of you know, I just started doing a group green cleanse. There are about 15 of my students, clients and subscribers at http://drritamarie.com doing it together along with a couple of hundred from around the world. This involves a week of blending greens with either vegetables and herbs, to make soups or with fruits to make smoothies, and drinking these concoctions instead of eating meals. This may sound very strange to those who have not tried green smoothies or soups, but I find it to be a very satisfying way to cleanse. While recipes abound, I generally just throw the foods in the blender, tweak for taste, and drink. While this may work well for me, others like to have recipes. So I am posting a new recipe I just invented and the methodology I used to create it, so that others may feel more confident creating a recipe or fixing up a recipe that just does not taste right.

I have been studying the concept of taste balancing. There are 5 primary tastes that our tongues perceive: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and pungent. If a food contains a balance of all 5 tastes, it is pleasing to the tongue. I have been using this in creating and modifying recipes with great success. This afternoon, I decided to try it with a green smoothie. Someone told me that mango and kale made a good smoothie. I put 2 mangoes and a whole bunch of kale in the blender and turned it on. The thick green concoction wasn’t bad, but it tasted to me to be too bitter and too sweet at the same time. I could have drunk it, but decided instead to experiment with the 5 tastes. I added half a bag of frozen strawberries to tone down the sweetness of the mangoes. It was better, but not quite there. I then added the rest of the bag, and ¼ cup of fresh squeezed lime juice for a bit of sour. It was starting to taste even better. Now I had sweet, from the mangoes and strawberries, bitter from the kale, and sour from the lime and a bit from the strawberries. Now I needed to balance for saltiness. Part of the cleanse is to avoid added salt, so I chose celery for the salty taste. 2 stalks were added. It was getting there, but needed a bit more salt. I added another stalk, making 3 all together. The last taste to balance was pungent, also known as spicy. I sliced a 1 ½ inch diameter piece of ginger about 1/8 inch thick and added it, along with about 1 teaspoon of dried mint. It was delicious! I offered a taste to my assistant and to my next patient, who had just arrived and they both liked it. So there you have it. A new recipe and a method for fine tuning your own.

Final Recipe :

Green Mango Delight
2 Mangoes
1 large bunch of kale
3 stalks of celery
1 bag of frozen strawberries or 1 1/2 cup fresh
1/4 cup lime juice
1 1/2 incu by 1/8 inch round slice of ginger
1 teaspoon dried mint leaves (or a handful fo fresh)
Water to desired consistency

• Put mangoes in blender and blend until smooth
• Add kale and blend again.
• Add celery, ginger, lime juice and mint.
• Blend until smooth.
• Add water if desired.

If you have an ice cream maker, this would make an excellent sorbet. Just pour into the container and turn it on.

I am liking this green cleanse so much, that I think I may continue another week. If you want to join us for the next green cleanse, check out the website, http://www.drritamarie.com/ for details. I will post it there as soon as we have a plan.

For those new to Greens and green cleanses, check out the Green for Life program at ===> http://tinyurl.com/3dvy2u . The audio tape interviews with Victoria Boutenko and Frederic Patenaude are excellent. The program also includes the transcripts of the tapes and the book Green for Life by Victoria Boutenko, and the cleanse guide. I also ordered the extra recipe book, which has recipes for green smoothies, salad dressings, and soups. If you order the program, you can do the green cleanses as often as they are held.

Bon appetite. Try adding a green smoothie or soup to your diet each day. Just that simple change can impact your health dramatically.

Yours in Health
Dr. Ritamarie at http://www.drritamarie.com/